Spamming the Blogosphere: the Spread of Splogs - Splogging Software
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I admit that this is what first made me take notice of this topic. Doing lots of fake blogs, even if you’re cutting and pasting, would clearly take a long time. But The Register recently reported on Brian Adams of Blue Diamond Enterprises, hailing him with tongue in cheek as the Gutenberg and Jefferson of the digital age, all rolled into one.
Adams created the Blog Mass Installer, a software tool that can create 100 fake blogs in under half an hour. You don’t even have to monitor the software too closely while it does its job. In fact, it’s even designed to get around the programs that would normally trip up an automated blog maker.
Google’s Blogger now uses a word verification system called Captcha as part of the blog creation process. You’ve seen this kind of thing before; it shows you some whirled letters that you have to type in to prove you’re a human and not a machine. The Blog Mass Installer chimes when it needs a human to enter the Captcha word. So it may not be totally automated, but you can work on other tasks while the process is going on—and far more blogs can be created in the same period of time.
This doesn’t guarantee that your blog won’t be deleted. It does, however, get you over what is supposed to be one of the biggest hurdles to proving that you’ve just created an actual blog, not a splog. And Adams is offering this software for less than $200.
For his part, Adams doesn’t see any real harm in his program. A tool is only a tool. “I wouldn’t say that the tools are just polluting [the web]. It’s the responsibility of the webmaster to put up content that’s actually useful. If they don’t do that, Google will delete them,” he said in an interview with The Register.
And Google would certainly be right to. Using the Blog Mass Index in the way most black hat SEOs would be inclined is a violation of the rules surrounding Google’s own AdSense program. Their guidelines include the statement that no AdSense ad may be hosted on a page “published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page is relevant.” Assuming Google itself actually adheres to these guidelines and enforces them, it would be a case of “not doing evil” winning out over the profit motive. Think about it; Google makes its money from advertising. Doesn’t disallowing this kind of thing mean it’s shooting itself in the foot?
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