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.
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