It’s official - a third of all blogs are actually Spam

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I have just read an interesting article on WebProNews reporting that the blogging platform Wordpress has announced it has to get rid of 30% of its blogs because they are splogs.

A quick definition of a splog: “A splog (spam blog) is a fake blog created solely to promote affiliated websites, with the intent of skewing search results and artificially boosting traffic. Some splogs are written like long-winded ads for the websites they promote; others have no original content, featuring either nonsense or content stolen from authentic websites.”

We have had our social media newsroom releases used on splogs before and unfortunately we immediately discount them. The splog which stole one of our stories recently didn’t even manage to link to the story very well, but to the un-trained eye they can look like genuine news blogs. I am sure there are companies out there who wouldn’t know any different and claim these posts as genuine online coverage but splogs are just a means of making money by stealing content and then using blatant advertising. 

Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress said that his company powers a whopping 2,523,000 blogs. WebProNews states that: “WordPress has had to delete more than 800,000 splogs” which equates to almost a third of all of its blogs.

I am not sure if this is representative across all of the blogging platforms as some have to be paid for and some don’t. I would hazard a guess that the paid for platforms have a lower percentage of splogs clogging up their systems - I can’t see these pirates wanting to actually pay for a splog.

Google announced as world’s number one brand

Yesterday Google was announced by ‘Superbrands‘, as the UK’s number one  business brand beating off giants such as the BBC. This has made me appreciate just how big this company really is. I myself use the search engine ‘Yahoo’, simply because that was the first engine my Dad introduced me to years ago. Interestingly, all my friends find it bizarre that I don’t use Google, as if the organisation owns a monopoly over searching on the internet. But of course they don’t and there are probably thousands of other search engines on the net, so why has Google gone on to rule the net, winning the crown for the brand with the best reputation?

Speaking of Yahoo, the business recently rejected a bid made by Microsoft for a ‘friendly takeover’. According to The Lang Report, Yahoo has just announced 1000 job cuts, its largest ever amount since the dot-com crash. Perhaps this due to the effects of Google’s growth in this sector. I believe in forthcoming years, the fate of companies such as Yahoo will be unsure, as Google continues to reign.

My university tutor suggested that the popularity of Google could be thanks to the idea of WOMM (word of mouth marketing). This is an interesting thought and I think he is right, especially when you think of the phrase ‘Google-it’.  It has become synonymous with internet searching and it is very common to hear people in work, the press and even teachers at school using the phrase to their pupils. I am told it actually makes an appearance in the dictionary now too!

Digital Communications is challenging search engine optimisation

There was an interesting article (paywall) which appeared in the last edition of PR Week which underlined a number of points I have been making in pitches to new clients recently. The main one is that search engine optimisation (SEO) has changed and is continuing to change and although buying into link farms and using SEO specific companies still works to a certain extent there is now a new kid on the block for getting high rankings on Google and that is using digital communications effectively.

In fact, the head of Google’s webspam team Matt Cutts issues a warning within the piece: ‘Buying or selling links that bypass (Google’s) PageRank (system) violates our webmaster guidelines. If a webmaster buys or sells links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index.’

Gaylene Ravenscroft, head of digital at Hill & Knowlton adds her point about the importance of social media: ‘Bloggers are becoming so crucial they underline PR’s importance as an integral part of the communications mix,’ she says.The article itself makes some more interesting points - which I will let you digest yourself. However, it highlights a campaign by Volkswagen Commercial which it claims was successful. The campaign included targeting bloggers with press releases and essentially spamming them. This is not how we would advise our clients to go about their communications.

Social media companies and specialist public relations agencies should be advising their clients to engage in the social element, not in press release spamming, as the blogging community can often find this intrusive and you could do your brand/company more damage than good.

Simon Collister another public relations blogger has also written an interesting post on this article with his views - basically damning the use of spam as a communications tactic. I mean who really likes receiving spam these days anyway - I certainly don’t and I blog.

Cross posted on: Norton’s Notes

Technorati Tags: SEO,Search Engine Optimisation,Search Engine Optimization,digital Communications,specialist public relations,pagerank,Volkswagen Commercial