At its core, my first impression of SocialRank niche websites was that it was little more than a WordPress splog scraping my content based upon keywords used and giving some kind of relevant or irrelevant ranking based upon some internal algorithm.

It is still my content appearing on a 3rd party site, in the same way as one of the millions of kubrik themed sites that just grab keyword based feeds from Technorati.

As I have said in the past, I license my content as GPL, so am quite happy for people to repurpose it, and hopefully if they provide a link a little traffic finds it’s way back to my site.

There is however one thing I absolutely detest

Don’t Use Pingback / Trackback When Syndicating / Splogging My Content

If you site contains no original content, if you are not entering the “blogging conversation”, I don’t want you to spam the hell out of me with trackbacks and pingbacks.
I sent an email to SocialRank to switch off the pinging, the pinging continued with my email box full of ping notifications. All I received in response to my email was an invite to their beta.

Would you join the beta of a company effectively hiting you with trackback/pingback spam?

I don’t see them anymore, I have told Spam Karma to blacklist them just like any of the other splogs.

On the other hand I read today an interview Ben did with SocialRank.

This seems similar to the Quechup debacle at the beginning of last month where an over enthusiastic viral referral system effectively destroyed the social network before it gained any traction. The first page of results in Google only mention negative things about Quechup – I assume they rebranded.

I never accepted an invite to Quechup, but I assume within the terms and conditions somewhere they gave some notification that when you provide your friend’s details, they would automatically send email invites. Thus the emails probably weren’t spam, and looking back through the few emails I received, were not to my knowledge in any way illegal, with a clear opt-out option, company details, a nice link through to a company privacy policy etc. In fact iDate who own Quechup issued a press release 2 weeks ago explaining the changes made to the feature to stop people making mistakes when inviting people.

I think the problem comes with people so used to how Facebook and LinkedIn have implemented these in my opinion quite dangerous address book sharing features, they assume every site works the same way, even if the other site actually had a similar but different feature well before LinkedIn and Facebook. The iDate press release mentions having this feature since 2005.

With SocialRank it is different. They are the ones filling my email box with pingback after pingback proclaiming that they scraped my content.

I don’t regard them as a stinking splog, they are still linking back to the original source with a followable link, but currently they are more annoying than Quechup invites just 1 month ago.

TwitterAdder

• Automatically create Twitter sales channels
• Joins other sales channels in the same network
• Follows Other Users automatically
• Feeds affiliate links to sales channels
• Ability to take other people’s Twitter feeds and remix them
• Built in vocabulary from existing feeds “oh yum… pizza”
• Name Dropping
• Ability to randomly source stories from Techmeme plus associated blog posts

Software concept as per all my work is licensed under GPL

I have just read over on 10e20 a post by Tamar discussing how Twitter can be used for direct marketing, by creating a product feed of special offers.

Why is it OK on Twitter but not OK on a blog platform?

• Twitter is indexed by search engines
• Twitter content is syndicated as RSS
• Twitter is indexed by Technorati

The WOOT Twitter feed is effectively a splog by most definitions.

Why do it on Twitter? You could just subscribe to their RSS feed

There is a huge difference between this, and possibly commercial use of Twitter by their newly announced web services and command line, where you can request specific information, and have it sent directly back to you.

Lots of people are using Twitter commercially, pointing people in the direction of content on their blogs, or those of others. Twitter needs a way to handle disclosure.

Twitter is already ranking well in search engines, it would be so easy to create a linkfarm of Twitter Splogs.

Om Malik recent was taking a look at Rojo from a traffic perspective. What he didn’t touch on, although he did refer to a previous post, was that the Rojo page was actually a very poor quality splog.

This is the page he linked to

With the pages being indexed and monetized, that would make Rojo a splog by many people’s terminology, in fact most.

In many ways Rojo are not even giving correct attribution for content that they might be able to use commercially, because they are not citing sources very well in the eyes of the search engines.
Here is an example link, showing how they are using a redirect:-

http://www.rojo.com/title/Q_PxEfMKb3QYI-Hp/WWg3sx9hbJ4MHCup/1169252114/http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FOmMalik%2F%7E3%2F78197566%2F

It should be noted that the link points to Feedburner, but I assume GigaOm has a pro account with Feedburner that might do some kind of SEO friendly redirect.

It is possible that the Rojo link is also being followed, but it is a little hard to check. It is certainly not a “clean link”.

As an example here is a Yahoo search

The page itself contains 3 Adsense adverts, so Rojo, owned by Six Apart, are monetizing other people’s full feed content, and not even giving a reliable backlink so that search engines can work out the original source.

From what I remember, at least Bitacle gave you a back link.

I have seen a lot of sites mention that all the search engines respect nofollow. Actually they don’t. Anlaysis has shown that Yahoo certainly follow and index pages despite the nofollow tag.

Trust

Nofollow was introduced for untrusted links from blogs in particular to counteract blog comment spam. It wasn’t effective.

Anti-spam that works

Various plugins for blogging platforms are wiping out spam on well managed blogs. Give Akismet, Spam Karma or one of the various CAPTCHA plugins for wordpress a try, and they will greatly reduce spam on wordpress, in fact almost emininate it altogether.

Wikipedia Links you can Trust

Wikipedia are now saying they can’t trust the links they give to other people, yet their own high prominence in search engine results is determined by the amount other people, especially bloggers give to them.

Bloggers Have Linked to Wikipedia Millions of times

I would guess that a good half of the inbound links Wikipedia has are from bloggers, and yet that link juice love is not returned. You have to be notable to have a mention in Wikipedia, and we have all seen recently that you have to jump through hoops to be classed as notable.

Hoarding Link Equity

Websites will be linking to Wikipedia, and Wikipedia will not be allowing the link to flow back out. Link equity has to flow, otherwise search engines cannot based on their current algorithms judge relevance.
By hoarding links with no follow, this will have a huge effect on search results, maybe similar to some of the more notable Google algorithm updates.

Relevance

By not passing on link equity to other sites, Wikipedia themselves become… irrelevant

Why link to Wikipedia with a followable link? They don’t share the link equity back out

Alternative Technology

It would be easy for Wikipedia to have a system for evaluating whether a link it credible. It could almost be a Digg like system where every link has to be vetted and have more positive votes than negative.
Wow scrape Wikipedia and create… WikiDigg

Actually don’t scrape Wikipedia, but implement a voting system for all links based around OpenID . In fact all editors of Wikipedia should use something like OpenID as well.

Anonymous Shills

Opps yep, most Wikipedia editors are anonymous… they won’t like using OpenID

I would link to Wikipedia to explain what a shill is, but that would be unethical, because their sources of information would not be followed.

Stop Wasting Link Equity

Andy Beal today discussed not linking to Wikipedia any more with a followable link. I quite agree, link equity was designed to flow, that is why I also use a dofollow plugin, so people linking to me or commenting gain a backlink. No spammers get through… What are Wikipedia doing wrong?

The Damage to Search Results

This turns Wikipedia into a black hole of link equity and will have a massive effect on their search rankings because equity will be passed from one page to another internally.

It looks like Wikipedia Stubs will be more relevant now than pages containing real content.

No Follow is Unethical

Lots of the material on Wikipedia has been sourced from other locations as a reference. If the links to reference works are nofollow, how is Google to determine the original source?

Any credits within Wikipedia are now worthless. Is that legal? ethical?

NoFollow Plugin For WordPress?

It is hard work adding rel=”nofollow” to all your links to Wikipedia.

Wouldn’t it be easier to use a plugin? That way all your links to Wikipedia can be wiped out automatically.

If you want a plugin to convert all the links on your blog to Wikipedia, so that they include “nofollow”, please voice your opinion by linking to this post, or leaving a comment.

I should note this is only a proposal, though it wouldn’t take long to create the plugin. If you want it, let me know…

I have read all 59 pages of this free report. It certainly isn’t junk, and it shouldn’t be ignored.

Mike Filsaime goes into great depths about how things are going to be changing in the Internet Marketing arena in the coming years.

This report is full of statistics and discussion on why certain types of websites have been successful, and he gives real examples of the type of sites that will be successful going forward.

He even points out services he will continue paying for, because it would cost him a huge amount of time and money to switch over to another solution.

So the content is very good, and if you read it, and take action, it will make you money.

Towards the end of the report, he goes into 2 very personal, and in some ways embarrasing situations Mike found himself in regarding copyright infringement.

I was already aware of one of these situations, in regards to legal documentation, and I extrapolated that out a little when I recently highlighted potential copyright problems if you share RSS content.

But he has actually been caught out twice. The second time all he did was display a graphic on a website sometime in the past, and the usage was discovered by the company who owned rights in the images.

If you are at all serious about what you are doing on the internet, I highly recommend reading his report. Not only for the insight into what might be successful for marketing in the future, but also to read about his very real copyright problems, and how much it cost him to resolve them.

Read The Death of Internet Marketing

It is quite possible you have seen other people promoting this free report, and you felt it was just another “me too” report, similar to the “Death of Adsense” report that caused such a stir just a few weeks ago.

Mike is using a similar technique to get the word out. The content within the report is insanely valuable, and I agree with a great deal of what Mike has written.

Mike actually skirts around some of the things I am working on with my own large project, but is certainly unaware of what I am looking to create.

It is not often someone gives away what could be a number 1 best selling ebook for free.

Disclosure: I will receive a small payment ($1) if you sign up to download Mike’s free report, and most likely he will send you the occasional email regarding his other products in the future. Mike Filsaime is one of the few Internet Marketers whos mailing lists I sign up to with my primary email account. It is always interesting to watch what he is promoting, but also how he is promoting it.
The tags I have used for this post give some indication of some of the contents, and also hint at some of the unwritten topics it can also affect.

A private subscription service for text, audio and video content, even involving a paid subscription fee has been possible for more than a year, based upon RSS.

In a recent podcast Robert Scobles interviewed the Google Reader team, where they made clear that from the start, one of the primary features of Google Reader was the sharing of your private RSS feeds. This is with total disregard for the intended private use of the RSS content.

Some background

For years email marketing has been plagued by spam filters. Whilst they become more accurate in detecting spam content, and allow requested content to be delivered, to effectively use email for marketing, and in some cases even personal messages, you would have to use an email service such as Aweber or Getresponse to ensure your content was delivered.
RSS guarantees 100% deliverability, and because of the way RSS is delivered, it is possible to include rich multimedia content within the messages. Delivering HTML email currently is much harder than text, and there are multiple compatibility problems with different email clients, both offline and online.
RSS will soon become integrated within our daily working environments, as an equivalent to email within Windows Vista, and online applications such as Gmail and their Google Reader.

RSS Technology being Destroyed

(before it has a chance to succeed)

One good example is Feed Magic. I have been a supporter of Feed Magic for more than a year, I own a license for the script itself, and a subscription to the service.

I am an affiliate for the product, and if you decide to purchase their product, I will recieve compensation. But that is not the primary reason for this post.

But can I effectively use them as intended?

Increasingly the answer is an unfortunate… no!

I can’t use what I paid for effectively, and that is the primary reason for this post.

The more indiscriminate sharing of RSS is being encouraged, the less chance break-through technology (that would revolutionise the delivery of marketing messages and vital support information) has of succeeding.

The Google representitives in the podcast actively encouraged the sharing of linkblogs.

I freely admit that the potential of Feed Magic is in its future. It has so much potential.

It should be noted that the RSS options provided by Aweber and Getresponse are nowhere near as advanced as Feedmagic. You could achieve their RSS features just by feeding your own blog with the content from your autoresponder by email.

RSS is subscribing to content you want. There is no way to spam your RSS box. If you decide you don’t want the content, you can unsubscribe.

So Google in part, with their Google Reader and very clear philosophy in the design of the service, are destroying something that could defeat email spam forever… the potential of RSS.

Robert Scoble had the opportunity to discuss this situation with the Google Reader team. Notice when he commented to my post on Google Reader (I assume he read it, and my reply)

Robert is also still sharing content of his linkblog, without asking the owner of the content permission.

This is just one example of how great web 2.0 software can actually harm rather than promote.

Edit: The Feedmagic site was discontinued – some of the technology might have ended up in Nanacast.

The press and “A” list bloggers have been constantly touting the use of Google Reader over the past few weeks. Overall it is a useful piece of software, and might even become my permanent rss reader in the future.

But the Google reader has major flaws, which noone is really talking about. In fact I have noticed a growing tendancy for reporting thee flaws as a cool feature, without any emphasis on the negative aspects of using these “features”.

Google Reader Flaw 1

The Google Reader doesn’t currently send readership data to services like Feedburner. If you notice your blog readership go down, it is because you have been touting Google Reader too much.

Google Reader Flaw 2

There has been a few mentions of “Linkblogs”, especially by Robert Scoble on his Scobleizer blog most recently here, but also here here and here.

Sharing a link blog privately with a few people, maybe inside a company isn’t going to have a major consequence.

But if 1000s of people subscribe to Robert Scobles linkblog this will have 2 major effects.

1. For Robert himself, his readership could go down, because people will read the main original story, not his commentary. It would be much better to refeed your linkblog somewhere, to at least monitor subscribers, and maybe monetize the feed.
2. For the original publishers, they don’t get subscribers, but they do maybe get more readers if Robert et al decide their posts are significant. You could potentially have 10000 people reading your content (full post content), and have zero subscribers to your own feed.

Google Reader Flaw 3

Link blogs again but in this case link blog abuse and splogs.

Google have taken some precautions with their linkblogs, unlike many services that offer something similar.

A search in Google for Roberts Link Blog will not find it.

Google isn’t even indexing links to Link Blogs

MSN seem to be in the same ballpark, obviously Google had a chat with them

But Google forgot to have a nice chat with Yahoo

Yahoo don’t list any information relating to the contents of the link blogs, which shows they are obeying some directive not to index the pages, such as robots.txt, though more likely something in .htaccess

Thus the shared pages in Google are not in themselves the same as other splogs that have been causing uproar recently, where websites have been taking full feeds, without permission, and monetizing them with adsense. (I don’t worry if people do that with my feeds, as long as the backlinks don’t contain “no follow”)
The major problem is that quite often thse are full content feeds, that publishers wanted read by their subscribers. Many publishers are currently trying to fight sploggers by installing plugins to their blogs, such as the Antileech plugin for wordpress.

The problem is that Antileech is now useless.

No blogger in their right mind is going to block Google from picking up their feeds to serve Google Reader users.

Each Feed can be assigned a tag automatically. The method to do it is not obvious within the interface, but it is possible.

That automatically grabbed feed quite often will have the full contents, and a plugin like Antileech isn’t going to do anything to stop it.

Once you have a feed available, preferably with full contents, it is very easy for someone to use that content on another site, sometimes without permission. There is nothing legally or ethically wrong with the tools used for this. There are plenty of reasons to use such tools ethically, and quite often the professional, designed for the purpose “splogging tools” actually do a more professional job of using and attributing your content than the simple free tools available.

One example of a simple tool is WP-Autoblog . More sophisticated tools can take a series of excerpts, automatically tag the contents based on keywords, substitute links with “deep linking” affiliate links (and yes that is ethical, because the blog ownes wants you to promote his blog and products). An example of such a tool is Blog Auto Publisher(aff). BAP isn’t a fancy tool, but it is hellish effective and can be used ethically.

Conclusions

Google Reader in itself isn’t evil. The features could quite reasonably for an ethical purpose.

I could quite easily grab all of Robert Scobles linkblog, automatically retag it all, and then feed it to a private blog for my own use, to better be able to find information on tech related subjects from a trusted source.

Something like that on a corporation intranet would be a valuable and possibly ethical use.

But in most such uses, the original author is not going to have subscribers to their feed, and is not going to know that their work is even being read.

My strongest advice is to avoid abusing this feature, and not publish the location of your linkfeed, especially on a high traffic blog.

To ensure I stay on topic, it should be noted that Google Reader is a very powerful tool for the creation of niche websites. I admit to using various tools to reuse and mix 3rd party content, including Blog Auto Publisher, but the content I use is with permission and where necessary with attribution.

Update: Some Supplementary Information

The sharing feature within Google Reader isn’t new. The big point is that until now, very few people have been sharing their feeds with others. It was introduced March 21st 2006 on the Google Reader blog.

Here is a very good technical overview of how feeds can be shared with Google Reader

Here is a nice list of tools that can be used to create splogs, but they can be used to create unique content as well, that has value to the readers of the content. We can add Google Reader to the list.