I usually have pretty set rules set up for myself on moderating comments. I hate spam and I want to keep my blog 100% free of it. I have come across a problem though, like in every aspect of life there are gray areas, spam is no exception.
I don’t know how many you guys know, but there are automated blogs, which scrape other blogs for info and basically create a blog out of these posts. Some people do this manually, the excellent Zen Habits Blog is one such example, entries point to other people’s posts, but they are hand picked, and the author in no way means to reap any rewards.
Let me show you an example of an auto-blog. I just wrote a post on speeding up Vista and a blog covered it about 5 minutes. This was the second such post, and all Vista related posts are covered in a similar manner, since I’ve been mentioning Vista a lot here, this one will possibly get in too. The spam factor comes in when you see the backlinks in the comments, but I am having a lot of trouble deciding if this is spam or not, here come my arguments, I would love to see some comments on this so I can decide.
You can consider these backlinks spam, since it is all done automatically. If I write a million articles on Vista all will be indexed and covered automatically by this site. In effect, the site is spamming me with backlinks. While this would not normally be a problem, I wouldn’t want any old site linking to me. I’d rather go for a few quality links than hundreds from who-knows-what types sites.
On the other hand the content may be good on these sites. I mean they don’t actually write any content, but they link to related stories, so people actually interested in Windows Vista related news may benefit. Also, they don’t pretend to write these stories, which is a very positive thing. They do randomly choose names, so my latest story was written by “Chris” I think, but I don’t think this is a huge problem. They do include two links to my site on each post, so if their site gets visited by a lot of people, that will mean visitors for me as well. Also, the site doesn’t seem to have any spam on it. There are no exe files to download, no sex ads and so on. This would make me mark it as spam immediately of course.
So in the end, what do you think? I’m inclined to let this go on, but I would really like to know what you guys think about this.
Original post here: Daniel
9 March 2008
| Net Safety
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