The Ethics Of Blogger X
December 14th, 2007
Disclaimer: The following rant was a by-product of what appeared to be some underhanded and unethical SEO techniques. Any references to these sites should not be considered endorsements but simply as reference to the dishonest techniques referred to. To ensure that these individuals do not receive additional benefits from this exposure, I’m incorporating the rel=”nofollow” tag in their links (consider this a non-vote by Google standards). Using the techniques discussed below may cause you to be blacklisted by the major search engines and should not be attempted.
To my surprise the other day, I received a large number of submissions for the Directory in the Business Blogs and Internet Blogs categories. The blogs submitted came in the form of general-topic blogs, with topics ranging from cars and travel to electronics. The first couple blogs I came across were filled with broken and nonsensical English, and a headline like How to make best of your Rome tour would follow with what seemed like nonsense. I came across similar stories in Remoov, Whiteman Library, Life With Pedro, Coach Ganville, Michael’s Daily Blog, Noobity Weblog, and numerous more. After taking a closer look at each posting, one would notice that certain keywords were included in the various posts:
Why would a number of completely different bloggers be posting about something completely the same? Same website being linked to, same general topic, and all posted on the same day?
Fast forward a little bit and we come across other similarities. All of these bloggers have comments turned off, and (with the exception of one or two) all of them have the default WordPress About Page which reads:
This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress
Who were these supposed “genuine” bloggers? Some of these blogs had text on their blogs stating they were “reliable and authentic reviews“, “experts comments” and “real and factual reviews“, but no explanation given to the inspiration of their postings. I can’t speak for everyone, but I found these statements strange and questionable. But still no real evidence as to why supposed authentic experts were all posting blogs about traveling to Rome, Canon digital cameras, car donations, cannabis seeds, as well as model ships and boats.
Then I started noticing a few blogs were including a link to a website called BlogNList, a site that sold blog reviews. For a nominal fee, a website would be reviewed on a set number of blogs with the users choice of keywords and URL. As mentioned in a recent post , the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank is a violation of their terms of service. And this was not merely a single paid link, but potentially hundreds of links.
So, is it ethical for Blogger X, to make claim to genuine reviews when the person being referred to is paying them, or at the very least cooperating with a company who is profiting from these links?
On a closing note, should anyone representing these authentic reviewer want to voice their opinion, feel free to leave a comment.
