So I noticed these incoming links from Technorati, all of which appear to be from automatically-generated Blogspot weblogs. They all appear to steal entries from a legitimate Typepad weblog, The Last Minute. I’m guessing this is another attempt at gaming search engines, but I can’t figure out the details. Take a look at the sites and let me know if you have any theories.
http://digitalvideo.blogspot.com/
http://digitalvideoediting.blogspot.com/
http://appleg5.blogspot.com/
http://homestarunner.blogspot.com/
http://thelastminute.blogspot.com/
http://ipodjack.blogspot.com/
(I’m not linking to them because I don’t want to help promote their Pagerank.)
Update: The creator of the cloned sites contacted me… He was experimenting with techniques for improving the Pagerank of his own website. He now understands the problems with this sort of cheating and promptly took them all offline.
Duh…none of them worked for me, except for thelastminute.blogspot.com
My guess is to look like regular blogs so that they don’t get deleted as referrer spam, then when they have a good PageRank the Google spammers would add links to their own sites.
Frankly I’m kind of glad that they’re using BlogSpot instead of a service unaffiliated with Google. PageRank created the environment for comment spammers, Google is partly responsible for comment spam (although not nearly as culpable as the comment spammers themselves).
If Google would create a way for us to link to things without affecting pagerank, we could end comment spam by auto-adding that to entries.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050118-4536.html
Story on the possible end of comment spam detaling the advent of a new html tag that will signal to search engines to ignore the entry for the purpose of page ranking.