• Register
• Log in

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

Blog Farms and Black Hat SEO

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 17, 2008 in Web spam

One of the queries that consistently sends a fair amount of traffic to SEO Theory is “blog farms”. I mentioned blog farms in a post I wrote more than a year ago without really going into detail about them.

Another query which is sending us a lot of traffic is black hat SEO. I’ve been using the expression “black hat SEO” in many posts so it makes sense that we should see a fair amount of traffic for that expression even though SEO Theory does not rank well for black hat SEO.

Blog farming seems to have been developed in 2005 but took off in 2006. It has undergone several evolutionary advances since then and will probably move into the so-called “white hat SEO” phase of content development in the next year or so.

I have looked at many blog farms and several blog farm generation packages. Blog farms are collections of generated blogs. The articles are posted by the software. Although they may originally have been created by the AdSense spammers I see them focusing on backlink construction now.

How an automated spam technique can become a respected “best practices” technique may surprise many people, especially since some so-called white hat SEOs don’t agree there is a strong connection between best practices and Web spam. But when Web spam ideas prove themselves through execution, best practices optimizers can look at the functionality and strip away the abuse.

Blog farming is very simple at its core: you create as many blogs as you possibly can, populate them with unique content, and then use them to build value in a destination site. The more cleverly built blog farms use real content that is made freely available either through RSS feeds from other blogs (which is why SEO Theory does not publish full feeds), through RSS feeds from free article distribution sites, through RSS feeds from press release distribution services, etc.

If someone is out there publishing full-body content, the odds are pretty good that someone else is out there grabbing the full-body content and repackaging it. The repackagers may or may not provide attribution for their sources (although from an SEO point of view it does not harm to link back to your original source).

Some autogenerated blogs are driven by RSS feed summaries. There are several such blogs that link to SEO Theory. Some of them cycle through a series of other blog feeds so that they don’t pick up every post. The resulting snippet posts thus look like they are “editorially objective” because even though the content is random it’s still organized by category.

The so-called Markov chain-based spam blogs seem to be falling out of favor. Their usually unintelligible gibberish seems to be pretty easy to spot and I’ve watched a lot of them go up and then vanish within a day. Most of these worthless blogs used to be created on Blogger and Wordpress.

One of the latest fads seems to be concerned with black hat SEO software that takes a few sentences, changes the nouns and adjectives, mixes up the phrase and sentence order, and generates an endless supply of meaningless drivel. These posts may be algorithmically undetectable for now but the filter production clock is ticking. Time will run out.

Black hat SEO is not nearly as experimental as some of its recent defenders would have people believe. Although I’ve certainly learned some neat things from Web spammers through the years, they tend to be a very lazy, non-intuitive crowd. That is, most of them just want to buy the latest script and use it to generate tons of link or revenue-producing garbage. They leave the real innovation to other people.

Blog farming can become a best practice if people find a way to generate truly unique and useful content in quantity at low cost AND if they find a way to develop reputable blog networks quickly. The community blog model is presently moving into a phase where mutual interests will help shape/define new blogs.

A community blogging site is a type of resource that any reputable SEO should be comfortable with. You’re not required to make more than a few contributions per month and you generally get some sort of tagline credit with a link. If you can participate in 10-20 community blogs on a regular basis, you’ll have a pretty solid source of links.

It’s black hat SEO if you create content that serves no purpose other than your own. It’s a best practice if you’re not violating a search engine guideline while you create value somewhere for someone else. That’s the real dividing line between so-called black hat SEO and so-called white hat SEO.

In the past I’ve said that Web spam is defined by excess in most cases, but I think that as search engines become more tolerant of volume it will be more difficult for people to identify excessive practices solely through volume. If you hire a group of writers in the Phillippines, for example, to produce unique, original articles for your blog network, who can rightly accuse you of creating content to excess? One might as well complain that the Associated Press, New York Times, and Washington Post are spam sites.

CNN is part of AOL/Time Warner’s news spam network by that measure.

In fact, the news media have begun expanding their own blogging networks with an intensity you seldom find in the Web spam community. If simply creating a lot of blogs counts as Web spam, the American news industry must be counted among the worst Web spammers.

Now, Web spammers have been commissioning original articles for several years. There are some Web spammers who have been buying articles through services like Associated Content in volume. These are the guys who embed AdSense in every informative and unique article they can get their hands on. They’ve breathed new life into the freelance writing industry and at the same time have helped outsource freelancing to overseas markets (because an American freelance writer needs to sell many more $25 articles than a freelance writer living in the Orient).

India, China, Taiwan, the Phillipines, and even some Latin American countries are developing whole industries of American college-educated blog post writers who — if they find regular work — can live well above their countries’ living standards while earning less than poverty-level incomes by U.S. standards. It’s the best of both worlds for U.S. spammers and third-world nation freelancers.

Of course, the American freelance writers don’t seem to be participating in this new bonanza of commissioned content.

Still, if you can bring together the right resources, you can create or participate in numerous blog communities to earn money, build backlinks, or just increase your visibility. You can hire people to publish interviews with you, write feature articles about you, your company, your products, and services, and your successes. As long as they don’t endorse whatever you do, you don’t have to worry about providing disclosure.

We could call this Blue Journalism. Blue Journalism is the new do-it-yourself publicity and public relations model. It’s evolving into the Blue Journalism Press Release. Press releases were originally created to help communicate with the news media in a time of crisis. They have since evolved to become alerts and pitch tools for the media. Blue Journalism eliminates the need for creating interest in the media by simply creating the news stories that schlocky press releases have always pretended to be.

We’re probably just witnessing the emergence of Blue Journalism blogging. As search optimizers we’ll improve the process and develop its potential. Some of us will do this for the links. Some of us will do this for “reputation management” and “visibility management”. Some of us will do this because we’ll have to stay competitive in a marketplace that is constantly changing.

Blue Journalism won’t remain the plaything of Web spammers and AdSense millionaires. Eventually it will become every day SEO, a fundamental technique for creating content that is informative, or entertaining, or opinionated. Blue Journalism will be used as advertising, as a funnel for shaping electorate opinion, and as a battleground for smearing people’s names, establishing professional credibility, and building the foundation for a new era of online marketing.

We may end up calling it something other than Blue Journalism. People may not like that tag. It won’t be quite Web spam and it won’t be quite professional journalism. The news media is already facing challenges from the blogging world but it hasn’t seen anything yet. It won’t be long before anyone can set up their own news network, complete with around-the-world editors who assemble original content from freelance teams. All the content will be created and packaged for a purpose other than to merely inform and entertain people.

It won’t be easy for people like you and me to figure out what the value in this type of content is. And if does prove to be a murky for us, imagine what challenges it will present to the search engines. On that point will the so-called social media search engines hang their hopes of toppling Google.

But don’t count Google out of the game, yet. It already has assembled huge resources to help the Blue Journalists. That gives Google the organization a keen insight into what potential may actually be realized in this area of content creation.

Maybe Google will drive the next generation of Web spam, thus living up to its old nickname: TSETSB - The Search Engine That Spam Built.