interweb rss aggregated spam for the sake of what?

March 16, 2006 9:43 AM

What is the point of non-advertising-based RSS aggregator bot blogs?

I'm starting to run into blogs like this a lot whilest doing Icerocket searches. What do these sites have to gain from amassing hits like mine? There's no advertising on them, there's no premium content, they're just excerpts of seemingly random data aggregated from seemingly random feeds on the web. I'm at a loss.

posted by analogue to computers & internet (2 comments total)

"Link spam"

They're trying to game the system and bump up search rankings by creating false sites that point to specific URLs. These are basically sites intended to get picked up by search engine crawls, and not for human consumption.

Similar methods involve strafing messageboards, link-exchange style emails, etc. I spend about 5% of my week dealing with similar nuisances on some sites I run.
posted by bhance at 9:53 AM on March 16, 2006

Look again; you'll find that site you just linked to has a mortgage link on it now. It's not advertising, it's link farming. It's the latest ploy to game the google search result ranking system.

Blogspot has been infested with this kind of thing for months now, so I'm not too surprised to see that LiveJournal is also being hit.

The reason they're using RSS feeds is to create "relevant" content on the site which is updated regularly so as to evade (they think) google's automated "ignore link farms" algorithm.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:55 AM on March 16, 2006