Splog is a relatively new term (blog + spam = splog). It refers to a web site, or blog, that is set up for the sole purpose of generating traffic to either Google Adsense accounts or to another web site. Invariably, these splogs use ‘scraped copy’ (keyword-rich text that is automatically ripped from other places in order to boost key word relevance in search engines like Google). These nasty little bandwidth wasters also make it difficult for legitimate and interesting blogs to get decent logo design search engine placement. People who use this tactic are often ethically challenged, and are helping make the Internet a less-than-cool place. Not that this kind of nonsense is a new thing. A while back, we began our Copycats feature (truth be told, I was sick of sending cease and desist letters to folks who had ‘helped themselves’ to our logo design examples, our web site copy and even our company name and logo – both of which are registered trademarks) and set up the feature to illustrate a similar kind of problem. Every once in a while, we trawl around the Internet looking for blatant rip-offs because:
a) we tend to get annoyed that people simply cut-and-paste material that we spent hours of our lives creating,
b) we think that these folks are doing a great disservice to both clients and the design industry by claiming heritage, experience or skills that they don’t possess, and
c) it’s generally uncool.
In a recent Internet walkabout, we discovered hundreds (yes, hundreds) of web sites hosted on Geocities – Yahoo’s answer to MySpace – and MSN’s Spaces) that featured material that had been stolen from our site, particularly our design articles section in which we attempt to feature helpful articles for designers and our clients alike.
All of these web sites had two things in common – namely keyword soaked outgoing links to an outfit called Logo Design Pros (who feature both .co.uk and .com versions of their domain) and copy taken word-for-word from our library articles – see who needs a logo and choosing a graphic designer. It appeared that somebody (if not Logo Design Pros themselves) were attempting to artificially inflate the Google Page Rank (a search engine system that ‘ranks’ a web site by the number of other pages that link to it) of Logo Design Pros’ site by peppering Geocities with web sites of little original content or worse (huge swaths of copy that had been ripped right of our site). Here’s one example. Here’s another. Now, this would be particularly uncool, especially for a company that purports to be a creative logo design company, so I used their web site ‘Live Chat’ feature to have a talk with a helpful chap who went by the name of Max. The transcript went something (exactly) like this:
So, there you have it (despite the fact that the chat window was closed at Mach 3 once I mentioned the reason for my ‘call’). Logo Design Pros deny having anything to do with ripping off our web site, in order to spam Geocities (same thing is also happening over at Blogger.com – over 200 Splogs with outgoing links to Logo Design Pros – and Spaces.MSN.com with over 128 similarly set-up splogs). Of course, I could be a wag and point out that it’s highly unlikely that someone else would spend all the time and resources to ‘bump’ the Page Rank and inbound link count of ‘somebody else’s’ site, but I won’t. I could also argue that if Logo Design Pros are indeed the guilty party (though I have no real way of knowing) that they should really spend less time spamming search engines and more time honing their design skills. That way, logos that look awfully similar to material we designed for our clients wouldn’t show up on their web site. Take DDR Tech – a logo that we designed back in 2001 for strangely enough, a company called DDR Tech (and featured as examples of website logos here). It looks remarkably similar to the design that Logo Design Pros are claiming they created for a company called Mystic Gulf Productions and featured on their web site as shown on this side-by-side comparion.
Funny thing though, while the logo we created for DDR Tech is featured as a trademark on their web site here, a quick Google search for Mystic Gulf Productions turns up absolutely nothing. Nada. Zippo. Guess we can add that to ‘things that make us go hmmmm’ column.
(oh yeah – the links above all have ‘no follow’ scripts, so that no lovely PR is passed on to our new friends at Logo Design Pros. It’s a new feature that Google and other search engines have introduced to combat the other bane of blogging – comment spam. You can read about that tag here)
Related posts:
- Doodle for Google design competition
- More flattery, I guess…
- Someone copying your website?
- Logo review sites – part deux
- Flowers, casino logos & credit card fraud
Tags: business, industry, rants, social media
Nothing wrong with creating sites to link into your own – but ripping off the content of others is not cool at all. Other logo companies seem to be doing much worse things these days though – it’s a very competitive, and sometimes downright nasty business.