Comments: Having Splogs (Spam Blogs) Boost Your Technorati Rank

Seth,

One minor problem with the theory. Technorati seems to work actively to remove such blogs from their search and, I believe, once they do so that any authority gained from its posts is removed.

There is an easier way though, just post comments. I learned that Technorati, much of the time, can't distinguish between in post links and comment links.

I discovered this quite on accident a while back (I noticed sites I commented to kept appearing in my links) and haven't really done much to take advantage of it (I've always posted a lot of comments) but it is interesting.

Give it a try sometime if you get bored...

Posted by Jonathan Bailey at April 27, 2006 10:15 PM

A decent compromise would be to go for the M-listers – it works in more than one way.

Posted by Zoli Erdos at April 28, 2006 03:39 PM

A friend of mine recently suffered a sudden plunge in Google rankings. She discovered a lot of splogs were linking to her, and she thought she was being sandboxed because of this. From there she developed a theory that enemies had somehow encouraged this splogging to ruin her Google ranking.

At this point, I was raising a Spock-brow and trying to talk her off the paranoia ledge. However, just last week I read this:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=71

Pagerank assassination. Hmmm. Maybe not so paranoid afterall. Worse, this is a corporate-sized weapon, for people who can afford to rent zombie nets and whatnot.

Posted by Elisa at April 29, 2006 01:15 AM

What do you do if hardcore pornographers are not just scraping full pages off your blog but also using your name to get up their Googlerank? I just found this out, by accident while googling my old archives. I stumbled upon some seriously hardcore sites with whole pages of my blog on their index.html. It's just driving me nuts!

Posted by liza at April 29, 2006 10:38 AM

Jonathan: Yes, they try to remove the splogs - but they're not perfect at it. And I think the comment trick has been mostly eliminated now by the "nofollow" tag.

Zoli: It's a matter of efficiency. Spammers don't have to be asked :-)

Elisa: It can happen in rare cases that someone can hurt you in Google. But I'm not sure it can be done so easily

liza: Report the sites as spam to Google - http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Posted by Seth Finkelstein at April 29, 2006 07:50 PM