Dave Sifry writes about the increase in numbers of blogs over the past few months in State of The Blogosphere, March 2005, Part 1 and comments on a disturbing trend in the many new blogs that are starting – Spam Blogs.
‘There is a dark underbelly to these numbers, however: Part of the growth of new weblogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs – fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites.’
I tried one of those as an experiment recently. I didn’t even put ads on it because I was hoping to keep it ethical (though blog ethics is likey a discussion all it’s own). I discovered is after 4300 automated posts filled with relevant links – all on a niche topic – that Google hates it. My handwritten blog on Linux is doing far better.
Hopefully many spam blogs go this way.
Too many sites, in this case blogs, interlinked to one another are a known filter trigger for Google. They are not only downgraded in the search rankings, but often receive penalties for spamming besides. Interlinking blogs and/or traditional websites is a bad search engine strategy that will not yield good results. It will likely get you banned from Google though.