The Death of Blogging....

Will Spam-Blogging Be The Death Of Blogging?

Technorati reports that 30,000 - 40,000 new blogs are being
created each day.

According to David Sifry, part of the growth of new blogs
created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs.

What are spam blogs? They are fake blogs that are created
by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search
engine optimization, or drive traffic through to
advertising or affiliate sites.

They contain robot-generated posts made up of random words,
with the title linking back to the blogger's own pages.

Many bloggers see them as a way of getting their pages
indexed quickly by Google and other search engines.

Sifry estimates that about 20% of the aggregate pings
Technorati receives are from spam blogs. Most of this fake
blog spam comes from hosted services or from specific IP
addresses.

Those in the SEO world are well aware of this. There are
even services like Blogburner that encourage creation of
spammy blogs and spam-pinging to get your sites indexed
quickly.

As a blogging evangelist, I wholeheartedly recommend
blogging as an SEO tactic. But I also emphasize that you
should use your blog for more than just SEO.

At the Spam Squashing Summit, blog services decided to
collaborate to report and combat blog-spamming.

Technorati currently claims to catch about 90% of spam and
remove it from the index. They also notify the blog hosting
operators.

But I believe that they are fighting a losing battle. As I
write this there are software and robots being created that
will create spam-blogs more efficiently and in ways that
will be harder to detect.

The SEO "black hats" are always far ahead of the technology
and safeguards that these services can put in place.

Take down a few spam-blogs and hundreds more will arise.

Blogging evangelist and PR guru, Steve Rubel, sums up this
dilemma rather well on his Micropersuasion blog.
http://www.micropersuasion.com

He believes that its human nature for people to exploit new
technologies, and that it's really up to the search engines
to help put a stop to these by undercutting the economics
of blogspam, much like they did with nofollow and comment
spam.

But the trade-off is that such a move would also reduce any
impact that blogs have on search results.

Fact: The more you abuse a technology, the less effective
it becomes.

Spam blogging will force search engines like Google to
change their ranking algorithms and eventually assign less
value to links from blogs.

Unless they put in safeguards to prevent robots from taking
over, its safe to assume that blogging will become less
effective as an SEO tactic over time.

Of course, the spammers will then just have to find new
avenues and means to spam the engines.

But why ruin a good thing in the first place? Blogs are
much more than just tools for search engine optimization.

A blog can be a great tool for personal branding and
building relationships with your website visitors and
customers.

Instead of using blogs for spam, focus on building
content-rich sites and getting high-value links to them.

Don't restrict yourself to just the SEO benefits of
blogging.

Appreciate the value that blogs can add to your marketing
and public relations strategy and use them the way they
were meant to be used.

_______________________________________________

Priya Shah is the CEO of eBrand360.
http://www.ebrand360.com She writes on internet marketing,
search engine optimization , and business blogging.
Subscribe to her free eCourse on Blogging for Marketers
http://www.blog-maniac.com

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