Cyber Abuse : Blog and Ping Part 1

Cyber Abuse : Blog and Ping Part 1 By Trina L.C. Schiller Too much of a good thing can be bad. We have always known this, but this knowledge has not stopped us from over indulgence. I think that rather than variety being touted as the spice of life, perhaps we should consider moderation. In recent years, the news media has warned us all about the over use of antibiotics. The warnings tell us that the bugs they [drugs] were designed to kill have been mutating into what are now called Super Bugs, as the result of developing an immunity to the drugs. The misuse/ over use of these drugs has made them ineffective in fighting disease. The drug companies don't care, because a) they've made billions of dollars selling these drugs, and b) they will make billions more on the drugs they plan to develop to fight the Super Bugs. It is a win-win situation for them. What does this have to do with marketing? Quite a bit, actually. For years, webmasters would have to wait anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months to have a web site indexed by Google, Yahoo, or MSN, unless they wanted to pay the big bucks to get spidered right away. The submission process, when done manually, was a very lengthy, tedious chore. So, we created auto submitters to do the work for us. However, it still took forever, in cyber-speak, to get listed. Then came new systems to get ranked higher with the search engines. The age of SEO was born, and webmasters got to optimizing their sites to get higher rankings, but still the wait for indexing remained slow. Then came blogging. It took awhile to catch on, but once everyone discovered that a blog was more attractive to the spider bots, they began popping up everywhere. Why are blogs more quickly crawled and indexed by search engines? Because of pinging. Blogs, RSS feeds in particular, have the capability to announce themselves to the search engines. In essence, a blog ping tells the search engines, "Hey! Look at me! I have something new to show you!" Static web sites can't do that and have to wait for their turn during the next crawl. In the beginning, this was an awesome thing. If you were technically gifted, and could handle the scripting, you could install a blog on your site and ping blog directories like weblogs.com, every time you updated your content. The alternative was to set up your blog through a third party, and let them handle the technical stuff for you, or you could visit ping services like ping-o-matic, and manually ping the servers yourself. It didn't take the gurus long to find software developers who could create a short cut to all of this and the blog and ping controversy was born. Software to auto submit your blog to the search engines. Along with the blog and ping software, they also created programs that would allow anyone to virtually steal content from other sites and place it on the blog owners' sites, programs to auto submit comments to legitimate blogs, and of course programs that generate spam blogs, which are nothing but pages of keywords, used to grab search engine attention away from the legitimate informational blogs, while allowing the blogger the opportunity to cash in on Google Adsense and other pay-per-click programs. If you take a look at weblogs.com you will find more and more blog listings that resemble: http://blah.blah.blah.com FREE INFO. Click through to those blogs and you'll find pages full of CRAP! Weblogs.com averages about 2 million pings per day. That is a lot of pings, and that number continues to grow. The demand on their server was so masive, that they were not able to keep up with the influx. That challenge has apparently been met with a solution. VeriSign has recently purchased weblogs.com from Scripting News Inc. for a tidy sum of $2.3 million in CASH! This means that weblogs.com will now have greater resources with which to provide a more stable and reliable communications infrastructure. Why am I going on about weblogs.com? Because Google uses weblogs.com for it's listings. Freely submitted data is easily abused. Like FFA sites, ping sites will lose their advantage as a result of all this spamming. Companies like Google are not interested in filtering spam from content, and will eventually ignore the pings and things, rendering them useless. Very much like the antibiotics vs the Super Bugs. So what happens when something becomes ineffective? It dies. Google has already begun to fight back against blog spam of other flavors. It will just be a matter of time before they ban blogs all together. All the money spent on blogging and pinging will have been for nothing, because it will no longer work. The program pushers don't care, because they've made buckets of money, and they've already been working on their next new tool to soak John Q for. Just take a look at the FFA and safe list businesses. How effective are they now? Freely submitted data abused to the point of no return. Copyright