Here's my inaugural Pet Hate. While I know there's many more in the back of my mind, and even more to come in the future, this one has struck me while surfing the blogosphere in search of candidates for my list of Star Blogs.
It struck me that some blogs are simply a waste of bytes. The "woe is me", or the "I ate an ice-cream today" self-indulgent blogs are many. I'm sure they provide some use to the occasional unwary pedestrian blogger so, live and let live! I'm not going whine about the many infantile blogs that lack opinion, craft or knowledge and merely exist to pamper the egos (or lack thereof) of their authors.
What I do find exasperating are the blatant commercial sites that don't even try to hide the fact that they are not a true blog, but merely a mechanism for attracting high rankings in search engines.
Take netrefinancemortgage located at blogspot.com for example (I refuse to link to it). It lacks any original content, instead it provides 132 postings of exactly the same content, albeit with different headlines, linking to the same commercial website.
If you check out the author's profile you realise that they are serious opportunists with 24 blogs of dubious quality. Although this individual/company has only been "blogging" for two months they have managed to clutter the blogosphere with 2449 posts (as of today). That is an average of 452 posts per week!
Someone bring on the Blog police! Blogspam is bad news.
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The answer is simple - allow content to self-organise. Any self-referential cluster of pages - i.e. this person's blog and the relevant commercial page will form a group of pages which madly reference eachother without having any enternal references. In a sense, this might be considered a net-geographical area. Search engines like clusty (see my post on the philosophy of search engines at this location will effectively corral this kind of spamming behaviour into its own single-hit cluster rather than allowing it to climb madly up search result tables.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, this kind of excessive linkage is a highly useful way of identifying other spam pages and clustering them all together, allowing less-highly linked but more highly relevant pages to get a good spot in our search results.
I would like to thank this person for creating a handy blacklist of spamlike blog pages by creating this linked cluster. In future, I will be able to avoid more spam pages by not visiting his cluster.
I think it's time for a firefox plugin.