InterPLAY St. Louis

I'll be moderating a panel on search engine optimization and traffic building for bloggers tonight at InterPLAY St. Louis in the University City Loop. Speaking on my panel will be two local SEO experts, Will Hanke and Ellen Gooch. The panel begins at 5 p.m. tonight, and will be held at Screenz on Delmar.

I would be ever so pleased if you could join me.

We'll be discussing the basics of SEO, explaining why bloggers need to care about SEO, giving tips on easy ways to optimize your own site, and teaching ways to protect yourself from content thieves who want to use your work to make ad revenue.

Tomorrow I'll also be speaking on panels about internet ethics and netroots politics. A list of panels is available here.

Fun with Google

StatCounter informs me that certain persons are finding my blog by searching for "wanton debauchery photos."

What an erudite way to search for racy photographs! Heavens. That's practically Victorian.

I'm sorta proud that the dirty minds coming to my blog are at least smart dirty minds.

(Was it you, Dwight?)

Last night I was number three on Google for that phrase, but this morning I've already dropped to number four.

Well, that's okay. This post might bump me back up.

The Fine Line Between Aggregation and Splogging: Part Four

Crossing the line

In the three previous posts, I've discussed the some of the similarities between blog aggregation and splogging, and also pointed out the some of the differences that set well-intentioned blog aggregation sites apart from sploggers. The key differences in my view are:

• Reputable aggregator sites ONLY POST SHORT EXCERPTS; sploggers post excerpts of any length and/or full posts, often including photos, from the blogs they scrape.

• Reputable aggegator sites ALWAYS ATTRIBUTE COPIED CONTENT TO THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR; sploggers may not attribute the content, or may deliberately give the content a false attribution.

• Reputable aggregator sites LINK BACK TO THE ORIGINAL SOURCE WITH PROMINENT, EASILY FOUND LINKS; sploggers may not.

• Reputable aggregator sites PROVIDE CLEAR BENEFITS TO BLOGGERS AND BLOG READERS; splog sites may not.

• Reputable aggregator sites DO NOT PRETEND TO BE SOMETHING THEY ARE NOT, while pretending to be something they are not is, in fact, the very essence of what sploggers do.

• Reputable aggregator sites DO NOT MISLEAD USERS into believing that the scraped content they present is produced by the aggregator site, or in any way affiliated with the aggregator site; they make it absolutely clear that the aggregator is meant to serve as a portal to the original content; splogger sites intentionally leave the relationship between the original authors and the site presenting the content unclear.

• Reputable aggregator sites ALLOW BLOGGERS TO OPT-OUT, AND MAKE OPTING OUT A SIMPLE EFFORT; sploggers do not.

But, what about sites that meet some of the "reputable aggregator site" criteria listed above, but not others?

BlogNetNews.com/stlouismo is one such site.

Recently debuted, BlogNetNews St. Louis is one of the latest in a series of BlogNetNews sites run by journalist , newspaper opinion page editor, and former Bush administration speechwriter Dave Mastio.

BlogNetNews St. Louis scrapes feeds from blogs and aggregates them on a single page. Like a reputable aggregator site, BNN only posts excerpts, not full posts.

However, BNN also scrapes and posts photos from blog posts. Not just thumbnails, but nearly-full-sized photos. And BNN hotlinks to those photos, which means that every time a photo is viewed on BNN, bandwidth is being used on the original blogger's website. This may not be a big deal for people hosting their photos on really big sites like Blogger or Flickr; however, if a blogger is hosting his or her blog on his or her own server, hotlinking can be a fairly serious issue. Hotlinking photos is widely considered to be bad internet manners.

BNN does link back to the original sites that it takes content from. But the links on the site are somewhat confusing.

For example, BNN has a blogroll running down the right side of the page. The blogroll is titled "BNN Blogs." It lists all the blogs that are featured on the BNN St. Louis site. But if you click on one of those links, the link takes you, not to the original blog by the original author, but to another page within BNN.

Which brings me to the next way in which BNN St. Louis strikes me as being little too much like a splog: through misleading layout and language, BNN St. Louis, in my opinion, will mislead users into thinking that the bloggers listed in the blogroll are affiliated with the BNN site.

BNN is not organized like a directory.

Take a look again at Alltop. Look at the way the blogs are broken down into categories. Look at the way the clean, simple layout focuses on the links to the blogs themselves, and nothing more. Look at the way the excerpts there don't appear unless you mouse over a link that takes you directly to the original blogger's site.

Now, take a look again at BlogHer. Remember, BlogHer is a community-based blog network. It was founded by women bloggers, for women bloggers, to address issues concerning women bloggers. Participation in the BlogHer network is entirely voluntary. Decisions at BlogHer regarding advertising content on the site are made only after examining the collective input of the entire community.

Look at the Journals page on CafeMom. Now, CafeMom did not start as any sort of grassroots organizing effort. It's a top-down community building effort, funded by a marketing company. But participation in the CafeMom community is, again, entirely voluntary. CafeMom does not scrape bloggers' posts for content. The journal authors at CafeMom are choosing to host their journals there on the CafeMom site.

And look again at BNN. From a visual standpoint, which type of site does BNN resemble more closely? A directory-style aggregator, like Alltop? Or an opt-in, voluntary community building site like BlogHer or CafeMom?

I'd vote for the latter. BNN is organized, not like a typical directory, or a blog search engine. Not even like a typical web-based feed reader. BNN is visually organized like a community-based blog network. And it's there in the name, too. BLOG (news) NETWORK.

But BNN is not a blog network. The bloggers on the "BNN Blogroll," by and large, did not choose to be involved. The blogs on the site were picked by Mastio. The bloggers did not volunteer.

How do I know this? Why, I emailed him to ask about it! And this is what he said:

I build each of our sites by hand, looking at each blog myself and gathering all the publicly available email addresses that I can find for the authors. Upon launch and sometimes before launch, I email all of those people with an explanation of what we are doing, how it works and what we hope they will get out of it.

Now, that doesn't sound so bad, does it? I mean, he is taking the content without permission, and he is presenting it in a sort of misleading fashion that implies that the bloggers whose content is on the site are somehow involved. But after he takes the content, he does at least email the bloggers he took content from to let them know he did it, right? That's what he said he does, in the email he wrote me.

But I must say, I found that response to be a bit suspicious.

Because the thing is, I know a lot of St. Louis bloggers. And not just casually, over the internet. I have, in fact, met many St. Louis bloggers in person. And I would consider more than a few of them to be friends.

But in fact, NONE of these friends of mine had mentioned to me that their work was being featured by BNN St. Louis. Which was a bit curious to me, given that the local blogging community has been all atwitter about BNN ever since Kurt Greenbaum posted about it on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Virtual St. Louis Blog.

(And not just because a headline on the Post-Dispatch website misspelled the word "bane." I know, I know. Everyone makes typos now and then, including and especially me. But this typo's been driving me nuts every time I link to it. Because bane is one of my Favorite. Words. EVER.)

So, I emailed several of my friends who were listed on the BNN site to ask them whether they had even been notified that their content was being used on the site. All of the people I emailed list contact emails on their blogs in easy-to-find spots. So, if Mastio had really been "gathering all the publicly available email addresses" he could find in order to contact the authors featured on the BNN site, then these bloggers should have been contacted, no?

As it turned out, most of them had not been contacted. Most of them, in fact, had no idea that BNN was scraping and reposting their blog content until they were informed of that fact by my email.

And most of them shared my opinion that the format of the site was confusing and misleading, making them look like they were affiliated with some sort of network that they actually had nothing to do with.

A "network" bearing, incidentally, enormous banner ads on every page:





Now I've done some research, and I came to discover that this is certainly not the first time BlogNetNews has met with some controversy.

Bloggers in some other cities where BNN operates have complained that they feel the BNN ranking system is unfair. When one blogger in Virginia who felt the BNN site was treating him unfairly asked to have his content removed, Mastio refused, citing fair use, and the frustrated blogger decided to shut down his RSS feed to prevent Mastio from continuing to scrape his site.

When a different blogger in Iowa asked Mastio to stop using his content because he felt that BNN's business model was exploitative, BNN responded by mocking the blogger over email and continuing to post the blogger's content.

When a blogger in Georgia asked to have his content removed from a BNN site there because he felt his girlfriend's blog had been unfairly excluded from the BNN site, Mastio again refused to remove the blogger's content, and mocked the blogger in the comments section of the blogger's own blog, saying: "When we didn’t cave, Rusty came up with the picture and launched his widdle cyber tantrum."

Does this sound like the operator of a reputable blog aggregator to you?

Because it sure doesn't sound to me like Dave Mastio has that much respect for the bloggers whose original work powers his site.

If Mastio's BNN venture isn't actually about promoting blogs or bloggers' interests, what is it about?

Could it be about drawing traffic to those banner ads I mentioned?

Or could it be about drawing traffic to those banner ads, AND drawing traffic away from blogs, to the newspaper websites Mastio has a history of partnering with? Propping up the struggling dead tree media outlets with fresh, popular blog content, for free?

I don't know. I'm not Dave Mastio.

But if I were Dave Mastio, I would think very, very carefully about trying to be nicer to the authors whose work I wanted to use.

The Fine Line Between Aggregation and Splogging: Part Three

Blog Aggregating Websites

Pretty much since the dawn of blogging, there have been attempts made, by bloggers themselves and by readers of blogs, to organize and network the blogging community in ways that make it easier for bloggers to find other like-minded bloggers, and easier for blog readers to find blogs about subjects that suit their interests.

The blogroll is, of course, one of the earliest adopted and most commonly used tools for that purpose. Bloggers make a list (or sometimes multiple lists, organized by region or topic) of links to other bloggers that they themselves like to read. Blog readers often use these lists to find other bloggers whose work they might enjoy.

Blogrolls have the added advantage of boosting backlink ratings for the blogs they list. Backlinks are links to a site from another location, and search sites like Google use backlinks as one indicator of a site's popularity. A high number of backlinks may positively influence a website's search ranking, especially if those links themselves are coming from a highly influential site.

In addition to the blogroll, another organizational/networking tool that has arisen organically within the blogging community is the blog network. Originally, blog networks were started voluntarily by groups of bloggers, usually bloggers who had similar interests or wrote about similar topics, who decided to band together and create a site together, a site dedicated to a particular region, topic, or cause.

BlogHer is one example of such a network, which focuses on women bloggers. Started by bloggers, for bloggers, as a place to promote discussion about women's issues among bloggers, BlogHer has grown to include an ad network and a successful national blogging conference series. Participation in the BlogHer network is entirely voluntary. Members can choose whether or not to contribute original content to BlogHer's blogs and message boards, and they can choose whether or not to link to their own original blogs in their BlogHer profiles.

Crazy Hip Blog Mamas is another blog network started by bloggers for bloggers. As the name suggests, it focuses on Mommyblogs, and again, participation is entirely voluntary. CHBM hosts blog carnivals, where all members are invited (but not required) to write posts on their own blogs covering the same topic, and members are encouraged to vote in weekly contests that nominate a "Member of the Week."

Sites like BlogHer and CHBM provide members with opportunities to discover and network with like-minded fellow bloggers, and help blog readers find collections of similarly themed blogs. Such community-based sites often also make a profit for their founders, from ad revenue; the large, sophisticated audiences they draw are a prime target for many major advertisers. However, since participation in networks like BlogHer and CHBM is entirely voluntary, and since members of community-based sites like these are usually given a good deal of say in any major marketing decisions, this is not generally seen by members as a conflict of interest. In fact, ad revenue often allows community-based blog networks to offer even more services to their members, generally benefiting the community.

Alongside the community-based blog network, two other popular methods of organizing blogs have emerged: the blog search engine, and the blog aggregator website.

Blog search engines are just what they sound like: search engines that specifically search only blogs. Google now has its own blog search engine. Icerocket is another blog search engine. Both find search results by searching through blog web feeds. If your blog doesn't broadcast a web feed, it won't get picked up by these engines.

Blog aggregator websites are a little more difficult to describe, in part because there are so many different varieties of websites that aggregate blog content. Some blog aggregators are basically blog directories that offer links to blogs organized by topic or category, and also provide some of the features of a software-based feed reader by notifying users when a listed blog updates.

For example, there's Technorati, which combines its own blog search engine and a well-organized link directory with a front page showing a constantly-updated display of brief excerpts of blog feeds from some of the internet's most popular blogs, right alongside excerpts from news articles. Technorati also allows site users to create personalized user accounts, where blog readers can set up their own customized pages to track their favorite blogs using web feeds, just as one can using a software-based feed reader, and blog owners can declare ownership of their own blog profile if they find it listed in the Technorati directory.

Technorati also rates blogs for what it calls "authority." This rating, similar in ways to Google's PageRank, is based on backlinks from other websites.

And then there's the recently launched Alltop aggregator of blogs and news stories, a Guy Kawasaki effort that is described on own Alltop's own About page thusly:

You can think of an Alltop site as a “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points — they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed.

Alltop does not use an objective popularity-based rating system to decide which blogs to list. Rather, as far as I can tell, it seems to pretty much just list those blogs that Alltop's founders like, plus any popular blogs that are either highly recommended by Alltop users, or specifically request to be included.

Like Technorati, Alltop also uses web feeds to provide up-to-the-minute updates for the blogs it lists in its directory. Alltop shows post titles for the last five posts from each blog; when a user mouses over one of the titles, a brief excerpt from the post is shown. However, Alltop is a much simpler site than Technorati; it does not allow for custom web-based feedreading pages like Technorati does. Nor does it have a search engine function.

The Fine Line Between Aggregation and Splogging

Okay, let's pause for a moment here. Reading that section just above about blog aggregating websites, did you notice something?

Blog aggregating websites like Technorati and Alltop scrape bloggers' web feeds for content, and post that original content to their own sites, just like many sploggers do.

But, before David Sifry and Guy Kawasaki start sending me hate mail for trashing their sites on my blog, let me just say this right now: I believe that most blog aggregation sites should NOT be lumped in indiscriminately with the sploggers.

Most blog aggregation sites have an entirely different intent, serve an entirely different purpose, and treat scraped content differently than sites run by sploggers.

Many blog aggregator sites, like Alltop and Technorati, provide valuable services to both blog readers and bloggers. Blog aggregating websites can help blog readers find new blogs that may interest them by organizing blogs by region or topic. They can help bloggers by exposing bloggers' work to a wider audience, and also by providing valuable backlinks to the blogs featured on the site. The benefits of blog aggregating websites are, in many ways similar to the benefits of feed readers and community-based networks, in that they bring more readers to blogs by making it easier for blog readers to find, read, and manage blog content.

And sites like Technorati and Alltop treat the content they scrape very differently than the way sploggers do. Unlike many splog sites, they post excerpts only, and not full posts. Unlike many splog sites, which show content without attribution, or even in some cases deliberately, falsely attribute stolen work to a different author, all excerpted content on Technorati and Alltop is credited, and prominent links are provided to lead users directly back to the original site.

Both Alltop and Technorati are organized in such a way as to make it absolutely clear to users that the sites are intended to be used as portals to the original content they feature. They are explicitly designed to help readers find new content, and help bloggers find new readers. The sites LOOK like directories. And they WORK like directories. They are not pretending to be anything other than what they are.

And, importantly, both Alltop and Technorati allow bloggers to opt out of being featured on their sites, and post clear instructions on how to do so. (See links in previous sentence if you're interested.)

It is nevertheless undeniably true that blog aggregators' business is built on the original work of bloggers. Any and all sites that aggregate blog content without the original authors' express permission must walk a fine line, in my view, between helping bloggers, and exploiting them.

And some do sites cross that line.

The Fine Line Between Aggregation and Splogging: Part Two

Web Feeds

Most bloggers, whether they know it or not, already publish something called a web feed, with every single post. The two major web feed formats are called Atom and RSS (hence the commonly used term "RSS feed").

Depending on how a site author sets it up, a web feed sends either an excerpt from each new post, or a full-length copy of each new post, out to feed readers. Feed readers are software applications (like FeedReader) or web-based applications (like Google Reader) that collect information from web feeds and present it in an organized, easy-to-read format. (Feed readers are also sometimes called feed aggregators, because they aggregate information from different sources in one place.)

I say most bloggers publish a web feed whether they know it or not, because many big blog hosting sites such as Blogger broadcast web feeds automatically as a default option. If you use one of the major blog hosting sites and you don't want to broadcast your feed, in many cases, you have to go into your blog settings, find the feed option, and manually turn the feed off.

Now, there are several advantages to broadcasting a web feed from your blog.

Many blog readers regularly follow upwards of twenty or thirty blogs. It can be very time consuming for a person who reads that many blogs to visit each and every blog they read every single day to check for updates.

However, if a frequent blog visitor downloads a feed reader, or joins a web-based feed reading service, all he or she has to do is subscribe once to the feed of each of her favorite blogs, and thereafter, the feed reader will alert the blog fan whenever one of his or her favorite bloggers makes a new post. This allows blog audience members to spend less time hunting for posts, and more time actually reading them.

Plus, software-based feed readers can actually download posts and excerpts directly to a user's computer. This allows blog readers with limited or spotty internet access to save blog posts while connected to the internet, and read them later while offline. This also allows blog readers to circumvent their employers' efforts to block employees' access to social media sites at the workplace (which may be bad for certain employers' productivity, but can be good for blog traffic).

In many ways, web feeds can be a win/win for blog readers and blog authors in that feed readers make blog reading easier and less time-consuming. It stands to reason that if more readers have more time to read more blogs, more bloggers can attract a larger audience.

However, let's say you happen to be one of the many bloggers who support their blogging habit via ad revenue.

What happens if a number of your readers start reading your web feeds on their feed reader, and STOP visiting your site?

If you have ads on your site, but a sizable chunk of your audience is reading your feeds exclusively and not ever visiting your site, that means those users of your site are never even seeing your ads. And in many cases, blog ad revenue is based either on click-thru rates (i.e., how many visitors to the blog actually click on the ad to see what it's about) or page impressions (i.e., how many times a web page is viewed).

This is why many bloggers who do host ads on their sites opt to limit their web feed output to excerpts only. This option allows you to send feed subscribers a heads up when you write a new post, along with the title of the post and a brief excerpt that shows what the new post is about. But in order to get the full post, subscribers have to click through to your actual blog. Once there, they see your ads.

However, this also keeps readers from being able to download your full posts and read them at their leisure, and it also keeps readers from reading your full posts in an environment where access to social media sites has been blocked.

So, bloggers who host ads on their sites and depend on ad revenue have the following options when it comes to allowing feeds:

• Offer greater convenience to readers by posting full feeds, which might in some circumstances wind up drawing a larger audience overall, but which also carries the risk of taking traffic away from the blogger's main site, thereby decreasing the potential for ad revenue.

• Limit some readers' ease of access to the blog's material by limiting feeds to excerpts, but prevent use of full feeds from drawing traffic, and therefore ad revenue potential, away from the main site.

• Eliminate feeds altogether, which may prevent many readers from reading the blog altogether, but also provides the best insurance that loyal readers will always visit the author's original site.

Some bloggers have started trying to circumvent the Larger Audience from Feeds v. Greater Revenue from Site Visits issue altogether by providing full feeds, but embedding ads in the feeds themselves, to ensure that the original blogger receives some ad revenue regardless of whether a post is read on the original site or in a feed reader.


Web Feeds and Splogging

So, I've already discussed the inherent advantages and disadvantages to broadcasting a web feed from your blog.

But there is a much more insidious disadvantage to broadcasting your feed that I have yet to talk about, and that is the connection between web feeds and splogging.

You see, the way many sploggers acquire the original content that they copy, without permission, to their spam sites, is by simply subscribing to the bloggers' own web feeds.

A splogger subscribes to a blogger's feed in the same way a reader would. But instead of reading the content, the splogger uploads that content to the splogger's own website.

One way to protect yourself, as a blogger, from splogging is to stop broadcasting feeds from your website. But this may upset some of your loyal readers who rely on feed aggregator services to organize and monitor their favorite blogs.

And the fact is, sploggers can also acquire content fairly easily without using web feeds. There are all sorts of programs out there crawling the web right now, even as I type, that do nothing but find text-rich web content, copy it, and upload it directly to splogging sites.

There is no way to stop sploggers entirely from stealing your content. Even if you found a way to block splogger bots from scanning your site for text, a splogger could still manually copy and paste your content in seconds flat.

The only currently effective way to fight sploggers that I know of is to go after them after they take your content, either by pursuing legal action, by contacting other bloggers who are being exploited by the site and asking them to help you put collective pressure on the splogger to desist, or or by complaining about the splog site frequently on your own blog, thus forcing the splogger to display negative content about his or her own site, on his or her own site, if he or she wants to keep stealing your content.

The Fine Line Between Aggregation and Splogging: Part One

On Splogging

Do you see any big, paid sidebar ads on this blog?

No. At least, not at the moment.

I'm not against ads, mind. I myself work in marketing, which is really not even a skip and a jump across the way from advertising; the two professions are so intertwined it's sometimes difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.

Besides, I'm a writer. A writer who has studied the lives and work of other writers rather extensively, in order to gain a perspective on writing, to improve my own writing, and also to gain a pretty piece of parchment inscribed in Latin that says I'm qualified to write critically about other people's writing. Fancy.

So, because I'm a writer, and I've studied other writers, I know that the one of the primary ways writers, and other artists for that matter, have traditionally supported themselves throughout history has been through sponsorship. Five hundred years ago, it may have been sponsorship by petty kings or religious orders; these days, it's sponsorship by Apple or G.E. or Toyota or Nike. I get it. Really, I do. Magazine ads support magazine writers. Newspaper ads support newspaper writers. And blog ads support bloggers.

So I am not opposed to ads on blogs. As a matter of fact, sometimes I make a point of clicking on those ads when I'm on other blogs, and looking at the sponsors. Bloggers, being individuals, and therefore both much more vulnerable to scrutiny than large organizations, and much more able to make decisive judgements on how to present their own material, are often very choosy about what sort of ads they will put on their sites. Bloggers often choose to allow advertising from small businesses or non-profits with a corporate ethic I respect. I am interested in the companies my fellow bloggers choose to support, and I am interested in what kinds of companies are willing to support bloggers.

So, the lack of ads here is not due to some sort of deep-seated philosophical opposition to blog ads on my part. The lack of ads is more due to the fact that, being this is a personal blog, I want to be careful about what sort of business relationships I enter into here, because this place is an outlet for the creative energy that spills over and out of the tidy container of my professional writing work, and a place to vent my frustrations, and a place to have open discussions with other people of like mind, and so it feels in a way almost sacred to me, this place, and I don't want to let just any old business partner in here with muddy boots, marking up the carpet. (Note that this feeling obviously doesn't apply as much to muddy boots in the comment section. The comment section is sort of like my mudroom.)

And I'm only pointing out my lack of ads to show you that, when it comes to splogging-- which, for the uninitiated, is the practice of deliberately copying content from blogs, without the original blogger's permission, to another website, in order to draw search engine traffic to that site and thereby increase the splog site's ad revenue, at the possible expense of the uncompensated blogger, whose traffic may decrease, all without providing any meaningful service or original content-- when it comes to splogging, from a financial perspective, I currently, technically, have no dog in this fight.

But I still like to speak up, and loudly, whenever I find someone splogging, even if that splogger is not splogging my content. Why? Partly on principle. The splogger may not be taking my work today, but that doesn't mean he won't take it tomorrow. And the splogger may not be diverting any ad revenue from me now, but that doesn't mean revenue isn't being diverted from sites that belong to other writers, writers whom I consider to be friends, who might actually need that ad revenue to cover the costs of web hosting and maintenance so that they can continue blogging. And it doesn't mean that same splogger might not divert revenue from my site in the future, should my site eventually become a revenue source for me.

Why do sploggers do what they do?

Well, it has a lot to do with how search engine ranking works.

I know a fair bit about how search engine ranking works, because, as an internet marketing writer, I often write search engine optimized copy.

Search engine optimized copy is text on a website that is written in such a way as to improve the site's search engine rankings for particular search terms. Say I have a client who runs a store selling clothing on the internet. My client wants me to write a description of a hoodie they sell that will bring more customers in to the site through major search engines like Yahoo and Google, by targeting customers who are searching for hoodies because they want to buy one. Let's say my customer's current description of the hoodie on the website is this:

Cotton/polyester blend garment. Machine washable. Available in three sizes.

Now, this is an accurate description of the product. But it's not a good description, from an SEO standpoint. Think about it. You want to buy yourself a cute new hoodie. You want to buy it on the internet. What do you type into the search engine?

Do you type "Cotton/polyester blend garment"?

NO.

You type something like "Blue striped hoodie," right?

But when you type this phrase into Google, my imaginary client's site will never come up in your results, even if they do, in fact, carry exactly the thing you are looking for. Why? Because search engines find sites for searchers by looking for the text the searchers type into the search box. And the text you are searching for is not on the website belonging to my imaginary client.

The point I am trying to make here is, even just to show up in the search engine rankings for a particular search, a website must have rich, descriptive text that relates to the search.

Sploggers know this.

And so, they also know that blogs, which are sites with a lot of text-- text that is rich in a wide variety of common phrases, text that is updated frequently, text that often mentions current events or popular trends-- are likely to come up in search engine results for a wide variety of searches.

Rather than going to the effort to write such rich, quality text themselves, sploggers steal it. To draw searchers away from the site where the text was originally published, and to the splogger's site instead. And often, the sploggers don't just copy text from one blog; they copy text from hundreds or even thousands of blogs, creating a massive wealth of rich text on their site to lure in searchers from all over the web. Thus the sploggers are able to draw in an audience using someone else's work. And any time an audience is present on a site, there is the potential for ad revenue.

So, sploggers are essentially opportunists and thieves. And lazy ones, at that.