Why has this blog been entirely copied? What's botd2?
March 4, 2015 8:09 AM Subscribe
So, my boyfriend operates a blog for a research project as part of his work. It's here. Today, he discovered that someone has apparently set up what appears to be a complete duplicate (with more default formatting) of the whole thing here (probably at the end of October, judging by the dates). Help us work out why?
We were puzzled as to what purpose this could possibly serve (not serving any ads, nobody else on the project knows anything about it) when I took a look at the source. For ease, here's a diff of the two sources. Lots of stuff with differing formats and content presentation - some images are hotlinked to the original blog, others are replaced with different images hosted on the copy blog, for example, but one bit looked a bit suspicious to me.
I'm no web person at all, but "botd2" made me cock an eyebrow (bot D2? hrm...), as did referencing that little gif, so I looked at botd2.wordpress.com and it's... interesting. I can't really tell what it all is. Just a list of links (the ones I've checked all have the same script from the copy blog in the source) with a strange scrolling thing going on. No link to the copy blog or the original research blog.
So MeFi: help me puzzle out what on earth is going on here? Is this copy blog being used to distribute some kind of malware or something? What other reason could this be happening? What the hell is botd2.wordpress.com for?
We were puzzled as to what purpose this could possibly serve (not serving any ads, nobody else on the project knows anything about it) when I took a look at the source. For ease, here's a diff of the two sources. Lots of stuff with differing formats and content presentation - some images are hotlinked to the original blog, others are replaced with different images hosted on the copy blog, for example, but one bit looked a bit suspicious to me.
I'm no web person at all, but "botd2" made me cock an eyebrow (bot D2? hrm...), as did referencing that little gif, so I looked at botd2.wordpress.com and it's... interesting. I can't really tell what it all is. Just a list of links (the ones I've checked all have the same script from the copy blog in the source) with a strange scrolling thing going on. No link to the copy blog or the original research blog.
So MeFi: help me puzzle out what on earth is going on here? Is this copy blog being used to distribute some kind of malware or something? What other reason could this be happening? What the hell is botd2.wordpress.com for?
Response by poster: I guess someone could have, but all credit on the copied blog is given to the exact same partners as on the original - that is, nobody seems to be taking any undue credit for it. I suppose someone could've created it to say "look here is a blog I run" for their CV, but they'd be really stupid to - it's got over a year's worth of content posted all on the same day in October, and it links back to the project site which links to the actual blog. It'd hardly be the most convincing scam.
posted by Dysk at 8:25 AM on March 4, 2015
posted by Dysk at 8:25 AM on March 4, 2015
One form of SEO is to copy material from other, relatively high-ranking places, into your own pseudo-blog, and to include the links you're trying to optimize on the pseudo-blog.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:26 AM on March 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:26 AM on March 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
Response by poster: Thing is, this little research blog sees very little traffic, it'd be a terrible target for that, surely? And there aren't any links added to the new page as far as I can tell, just the weird script...
posted by Dysk at 8:29 AM on March 4, 2015
posted by Dysk at 8:29 AM on March 4, 2015
Traffic levels are irrelevant. The Google rating system gives bonuses to sites which update regularly, so the pseudo-blog updates regularly by stealing material from you.
That "botd2" looks like their SEO payload.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:33 AM on March 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
That "botd2" looks like their SEO payload.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:33 AM on March 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
+1 for SEO. This is a common way to build out link farms. Look at the source and you should be able to find some links to other sites. They're using real content so that Google thinks it's a real site linking to them. Formatting discrepancy might be because they're pulling the content from the RSS feed.
posted by iamscott at 8:34 AM on March 4, 2015
posted by iamscott at 8:34 AM on March 4, 2015
You can get it taken down by requesting a DMCA request to Wordpress.
posted by zsazsa at 8:39 AM on March 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by zsazsa at 8:39 AM on March 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: But... there are no links to other sites in the source. Just the exact same links on the original blog, and this weird script that references botd2.wordpress.com. How would that be link-farming?
(And yeah, we are totally contacting wordpress to get it taken down, I just want to figure out what on earth is going on)
posted by Dysk at 8:45 AM on March 4, 2015
(And yeah, we are totally contacting wordpress to get it taken down, I just want to figure out what on earth is going on)
posted by Dysk at 8:45 AM on March 4, 2015
botd2 ***is*** the link they're pimping. It's to a page which contains a list of links, most of which look legitimate. But probably one or two of those, in turn, link to other stuff they're trying to SEO.
SEO strategies can be very deep, because Google has implemented sophisticated checks to ignore the simple stuff.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:02 AM on March 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
SEO strategies can be very deep, because Google has implemented sophisticated checks to ignore the simple stuff.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:02 AM on March 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: But they aren't putting in a link to botd2 - there's a bit of javascript that looks like it may be embedding a dummy image? Would that really be enough to pump their Google rank?
posted by Dysk at 9:10 AM on March 4, 2015
posted by Dysk at 9:10 AM on March 4, 2015
You should also consider the possability that this is the result of a bug in a SEO spam system. People who write SEO spam systems aren't the best and the brightest, nor are their users. Some SEO doofus probably just fired off an automatic system and let it run without checking that it is working correctly. I'd just file the DMCA complaint and move on. There are too many weird things happening on the Internet to get try to figure everything out.
posted by ChrisHartley at 10:03 AM on March 4, 2015
posted by ChrisHartley at 10:03 AM on March 4, 2015
Is it also possible that they're laying the groundwork for some later SEO stuff? I've been getting a bloom of "your ancient blog entry link to resource X no longer works, how about resource Y?" spam recently. It could be that (this SEO implementor thinks that) Google gives extra juice to old entries which update, so they're laying the groundwork now for something that'll pay off in months to years.
posted by straw at 10:45 AM on March 4, 2015
posted by straw at 10:45 AM on March 4, 2015
A quick Google search revealed, that there is a mobile app probably using the replica blog as their source (which could explain the additional source stuff): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appbuilder.u716873p1150411&hl=en
It was suspiciously created in Oct 2014 by GAMOS.org, which is also mentioned in both blogs. No idea why they would set up a replica but it would probably be a good start to ask them directly.
posted by KMB at 11:39 AM on March 4, 2015
It was suspiciously created in Oct 2014 by GAMOS.org, which is also mentioned in both blogs. No idea why they would set up a replica but it would probably be a good start to ask them directly.
posted by KMB at 11:39 AM on March 4, 2015
Response by poster: GAMOS are a project partner and aren't using the replica blog for the app - we checked that. It could well be some weird SEO stuff (possibly gone wrong) I suppose, but it really looks to me like it's being done by hand - posts are duplicated days to weeks late, on an erratic schedule, a few images are changed (to ones hosted by the duplicate blog whereas most of them are hotlinking to the original blog's images) which really puzzles me.
We are indeed moving to have it taken down, but it's one of those things that will always niggle at the back of my mind if I don't figure out what's going on. Guess I'll likely just have to live with that.
posted by Dysk at 12:23 PM on March 4, 2015
We are indeed moving to have it taken down, but it's one of those things that will always niggle at the back of my mind if I don't figure out what's going on. Guess I'll likely just have to live with that.
posted by Dysk at 12:23 PM on March 4, 2015
Remember, a high-ranked site lends power to those it in turn links to. The old way of SEO was to create incestuous groups of sites which linked to each other, but Google caught on to that approach a long time ago, and now if a group of sites has lots of interlinking but little going out or coming in, it's actually penalized for it. If they come into existence and then don't change, that is an additional penalty.
So the new approach for SEO link farms is to create open groups of continuously updating sites, with lots of linking outwards and as much linking inwards as they can manage to pull off (though that's harder). The vast majority of the links going out are innocent, and only a few, maybe only one, is part of the farm.
The goal is to create a swarm of sites whose rankings are average, and use those to create a second smaller swarm with ranks a bit higher than average, which leads to a small number of sites with really pretty good rankings. Repeat for three, four, five, or more levels. Eventually you've cultivated a handful of sites that look quite good to Google and you have all of them link to the single site you really want to pimp.
Your pseudo-blog is probably part of the lowest, largest, group.
Someday someone is going to write a book about the twilight war between search engine engineers and SEO bandits and it's going to be fascinating. Every year or two Google revises its rating system, sometimes quite radically, and occasionally there's considerable collateral damage. (Metafilter got caught by that a couple of years ago and traffic from Google, and thus advertising revenue, dropped like a stone.)
For a few months the SEO bandits experiment to see what they can do to sneak past the new rejection algorithm, and eventually someone figures out a new approach, and SEO bandits once again pollute the search results. The Google engineers notice, and adjust their rejection algorithms again. It's been a running battle for at least 15 years and it won't end any time soon, because the stakes are too high on both sides.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 12:52 PM on March 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
So the new approach for SEO link farms is to create open groups of continuously updating sites, with lots of linking outwards and as much linking inwards as they can manage to pull off (though that's harder). The vast majority of the links going out are innocent, and only a few, maybe only one, is part of the farm.
The goal is to create a swarm of sites whose rankings are average, and use those to create a second smaller swarm with ranks a bit higher than average, which leads to a small number of sites with really pretty good rankings. Repeat for three, four, five, or more levels. Eventually you've cultivated a handful of sites that look quite good to Google and you have all of them link to the single site you really want to pimp.
Your pseudo-blog is probably part of the lowest, largest, group.
Someday someone is going to write a book about the twilight war between search engine engineers and SEO bandits and it's going to be fascinating. Every year or two Google revises its rating system, sometimes quite radically, and occasionally there's considerable collateral damage. (Metafilter got caught by that a couple of years ago and traffic from Google, and thus advertising revenue, dropped like a stone.)
For a few months the SEO bandits experiment to see what they can do to sneak past the new rejection algorithm, and eventually someone figures out a new approach, and SEO bandits once again pollute the search results. The Google engineers notice, and adjust their rejection algorithms again. It's been a running battle for at least 15 years and it won't end any time soon, because the stakes are too high on both sides.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 12:52 PM on March 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
Did you do a whois search on the host name? Might not tell you anything, but you never know.
posted by oceanjesse at 2:21 PM on March 4, 2015
posted by oceanjesse at 2:21 PM on March 4, 2015
Don't overthink this. There's really no logical "reverse engineering" of why who does what on the internet. Surely this is something in the SEO realm. Understanding "why" isn't worth the effort.
posted by humboldt32 at 2:44 PM on March 4, 2015
posted by humboldt32 at 2:44 PM on March 4, 2015
Plus there are a great number of theoretical strategies that are inscrutable by definition.
posted by rhizome at 4:04 PM on March 4, 2015
posted by rhizome at 4:04 PM on March 4, 2015
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by mareli at 8:22 AM on March 4, 2015