Steve Mills - Online Entrepreuership with the SPOKE system

Invasion of the Bloggy Snatchers

I have been noticing lately the proliferation of content skimming that is occurring on blogs. Content, even whole posts can be taken by automated bots, and then be used to fill a whole swarm of zombie like auto generated pages, in an attempt to lure an unsuspecting web surfer into thinking that it is a real blog. These bots then fill the rest of the site with adsense ads and other monetization strategies, enabling someone to make a passive income from preying on the talent of other writers.

If you find yourself accidentally on one of these sites (and it is easy to tell) please don’t click the ads, you will only encourage them. I think that a Googles latest pagerank update has done something to fix these pages appearing in the search results, but I also suspect that they may penalise the original page that the content came from. There is a “duplication penalty” applied to both pages when duplicate content is found.

There is also a whole sub-genre of “niche sites” which are the human generated version of this practice. People who just basically re-write the posts of others, put up about 10 posts and then try to SEO as hard as they can, or buy adsense links to monetize it. Although not as bad as the automated army of the dark, they still devalue the whole idea of blogging to the general web surfer. If you visited 10 blogs, and they were all filled with shallow information of dubious nature, would you be likely to invest the time and energy to read more blogs in the future?

I have been trying to think of ways around this problem, but putting “If you are not reading this on GreenGem.net, this content has been stolen” at the bottom of every post seems a bit excessive. Hopefully googles correction is enough of a discouragement to the zombie lords that it no longer becomes viable practice and disappears.