Sunday, December 16, 2007

What's with the Yellow Blogs?

From time to time, I check the links to my posts on this blog. Quite often, one or more leads to a "blog" with a yellow stripe near the top, no topic, and posts apparently lifted at random from other blogs. I think I've seen other patterns too, some much less coherent.

My suspicion is that it's some kind of scam involving generating hits in order to sell ads, but the particular one I just looked at, although it says "ads by Google," doesn't appear to have any.

Anyone know?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

They're splogs (spam blogs) and are automatically generated and pull content from elsewhere in an attempt to get hits. They're generated to the tune of thousands upon thousands a day.

The reason why there aren't ads being displayed by google is that it has either not been activated yet or because they've been suspended. The page source of the blog does direct to googleads.

Mark Cuban (for those that can stand him) has written a bit about it over the years
http://www.blogmaverick.com/search/?q=splog

Tim Worstall said...

Showing that I am in touch with my inner child: I'm amused to note that this blog post has been linked to by one of those splogs.

The aim is, as above, to generate automatic content which then gets hit and possible Adsense revenues. Very low conversion rates which is why it's all automated allowing one individual to be creating tens of thousands of such pages a day.

David_Z said...

I've been getting more and more links like that, often from "blogs" with legitimate but suspicious sounding URLs.

The giveaway is: "Read the rest of this great post here..." (not an active linke) or some minor variation on that theme, which seems to always be the sentence linking back to my post. I habitually mark them as spam.