Grasshoppermind

First there was Blog and Ping. What was initially a legitimate method for informing blog indexes (such as Technorati) of new content, was rapidly morphed into an automated and dubious technique used by some internet marketers to drive their websites up the Search Engine page rankings. And this worked (for a while) until Google et al. caught up and altered their ranking algorithms.

Blackhat search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques often involve the creation of huge blog farms of autogenerated pseudo content all linking back and forth to each other. These useless (to the reader anyway) blogs have become known as Splogs= Spam+Blogs.

Another technique which will be recognised by anyone who has run a genuine blog for any time are Spam Comments - again designed to create backlinks from authoritative page ranked sites to the website that was being SEO’ed. Indiscriminate use of specifically written comment spamming programs has resulted in this widespread nuisance - which because most people now use REL=NOFOLLOW for their comments - no longer provides any benefits to the users of this technique.

Now we are beginning to see exploitation of Web2.0 tagging in the drive for higher search engine rankings. Automated Tag and Ping programs have been developed and released(and no I’m not going to link to them). Now we will see the automated poisoning of tagging which will reduce its effectiveness and lead to greater amounts of Splog in our feed readers.

Will we see a new round of Splogs using this method? I believe that we will, because the short term gains will appeal to the ‘get rich quick’ mindset that makes up one segment of the Internet Marketing community.

Ultimately another round of countermeasures will be produced which will reduce Tag and Ping effectiveness… and so the cycle will continue.