A splogging we will go
Not that we mind writing content for our competitors’ blogs or anything..
Splogging, a conflation of the words blog and spam, is an SEO technique used by website operators to artificially inflate the inbound ‘link love’ to their sites by using secondary blogs hosted on platforms like WordPress and Blogger. The basic idea is that the more sites point to your site, the more it’s seen as ‘popular’ and thus move up the search rankings (lots more details in our monster sized SEO and logo design blog post). Trouble is, running a splog network burns up content. Lots and lots of content. Solution? Well, there’s logo raiding for starters. Then, there’s copying other people’s articles and blog posts (referred to as content scraping) and use them for the SEO purposed blogs. Trouble is, people tend to freak out (guilty as charged) when they find someone has pinched work they’ve spent hours, maybe days in getting just so. Solution part deux for our innovative sploggers? Rewrite the copy, using a thesaurus to hand edit articles, or Article Spinner software to do it automatically. Yes, there is actually software that will regurgitate other folk’s prose into new copy for this very reason (gotta love them spammers).
While neither of these two techniques produce particularly compelling copy (in fact, most splogged knock-offs are nonsensical drivel), it’s technically different than the original, so the initial author, even if they recognize the splog article as a knock-off, can’t really say too much. Which is exactly what happened here. Except for one small hitch. The cat repurposing our illustrative logos article for a competitor’s splog either ran out of steam, or lost his place, uploading an article onto the WordPress server that featured half of the original intact. And when it found its way into Google search results, I practically fell over it.
Oh dear. Not that I mind supplying The Logo Factory® competitors with their blog content or anything, especially when it’s being used for such honorable purposes, but this article was mucking things up in search engines for the original, which up until now, was doing pretty well. Maybe it was time to hit them up with a comment. As I was the one that wrote the article, I posted it personally.
Sadly, that comment was ignored and deleted. Dudes must have wondered “who does this Steve Douglas wanker think he is?’ though they probably wondered it in Urdu or Pashtun, as most of this SEO skullduggery takes place in Karachi, Pakistan. It wasn’t till I logged into the splog as The Logo Factory did I get any joy. Namely, the post removed in about ten minutes flat.
Oh, I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation for all this. Though they opted not to tell me what it was when I sent the “Executive Vice President’ an e-mail. Alas, this wasn’t the first time that we’d ran into these lovely chaps.
Nor do I expect it will be the last.
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