Fake Blogs

September 14, 2005 9:34 AM

What's the point of fake blogs?

Testing out the new Google blog search, and in my experience with Technorati's blog search, I've come across a number of blogs that clearly exist to draw search engine traffic -- they're informationally barren, and many of them don't even have links to the topic they supposedly cover, be it hair salons or airfare. Are they just part of a pagerank game for some other site or Adsense adfarms, or is there some other use?

As a follow-up question, is there any way to flag these sites with Google or Technorati to get them out of the searches?

posted by me3dia to computers & internet (10 comments total)

You've got the right idea. They are link-farms to game the pagerank system. Blogger does have a way to flag suspect blogs (which is itself controversial, as you might imagine). I don't know of a way to flag them in Google or Technorati; since Google owns Blogger, I'd like to imagine they're working on the problem anyhow.
posted by adamrice at 9:39 AM on September 14, 2005

they can be topical, and quite funny
posted by whatitis at 9:39 AM on September 14, 2005

Can you flag a Blogger-powered blog that isn't on blogspot?
posted by me3dia at 9:43 AM on September 14, 2005

I guess that's the more important question to me: How do you get rid of them? Can they be flagged as noise to Technorati, Google, etc.?
posted by me3dia at 9:49 AM on September 14, 2005

me3dia, you can. Both my brothers have Blogger blogs hosted on my domain.
posted by chunking express at 9:55 AM on September 14, 2005

In the first link, there is an ad to make the money (you can report violating Google ads, just click on the "ads by Google" link). On the second, the two links that would normally lead to other posts do go to an AdSense page, thus making it a link farm.

I don't know about Technocrati but I can tell you almost for sure that Blog Search doesn't offer a reporting tool yet (Google always puts options wide in the open and this one isn't).
posted by abcde at 9:59 AM on September 14, 2005

chunking express: He meant is it possible to report non-BlogSpot blogs to Blogger, not whether it's possible to self-host your blogs in the first place.

I'm pretty sure the answer is no.
posted by abcde at 10:02 AM on September 14, 2005

By linking to them from a popular site like MetaFilter, you're helping them.
posted by D.C. at 10:03 AM on September 14, 2005

By linking to them from a popular site like MetaFilter, you're helping them.

Ideally, one would use rel="nofollow" in a case like this.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:28 PM on September 14, 2005

Sorry, didn't think about that. Perhaps the administrators can hope me?
posted by me3dia at 12:52 PM on September 14, 2005