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Some SEO with your Spam sir? So here there I was, sitting around on a fine sunny Sunday afternoon (sounds like the makings of a song?) and in an effort to see what else was up in the search world other than the PR Brew-ha-ha, I wandered farther and deeper than usual. Believe me you have to go a long way to avoid PR posts lately. Generally speaking, I dont play around at Technorati too often as my news reader(s) already have more than enough tidal surge flowing in daily as it is, but today is an exception in desperation . As I dug through mounds and mounds of blog posting mania on PageRank, I started seeing some pretty funky MFA sites (made for AdSense) out there of interest. Of particular note was one that had the title So you want to be an SEO. This caught my attention because I was pretty sure I had seen it earlier in the day on Tim Nashs SEO Blog. This caught me by surprise so I clicked it. Wow, not thats some minty fresh scraping there I must say!!
The other one that popped up from Technorati was a not-so-dissimilar scraper site.
Ok, now this is getting interesting. I seem to remember seeing this blog template somewhere? Oh yeah - this Spammer owns ShadySEO don't he? It figures, (actually just the same theme) - Oh well, maybe not, moving on... I then decided to poke around and see what footprints I could come up with, which didnt take long.
** Now I know the boys down at the club will take away my membership card, but this one is just too easy and these folks wouldnt last long anyways. I asked Tim what he thought and were in agreement, so lets have some fun with it shall we? Shhhhhhh!! Were huntin WebSpam
huh u huh u
The first footprint I figured I would zoom in on was, People are always asking me to blog more often, well here you go as you can see we have everything from ' Hollywood Paparazzi' and 'P2P' all the way down to ' Free Internet Services ' and ' Flowers' . A wide variety there, leave no stone unturned huh? At least the one for Roman Books and the Presidential Election have done some nice template to work to increase conversion  potential...ha ha ha ha
. There are some other pretty obvious footprints that work on these such as Last night I used Google to find more info on and Today I was digging for some info on. Man, that is just too easy. Wheres the quality and ingenuity? I hope the link profiles look better
. Not exactly Spamming 101 here so far. As you might imagine the bulk of the the links are from inter-connectors (on 1 or 2 servers/IPs) and other Spam sites. There was the random Technorati link here and there, but nothing spectacular. They have done well mind you, to avoid cross-linking sites into reciprocals too often, thats at least something. Still, this is a Spammy link profile which undermines theories about Google's ability to discern them algorithmically, that's for sure. If they could have found ONE of these, working out the rest of the network would be child's play - I guess FUD is less work. Of interest for me is the fact that the majority of these sites are being spidered, indexed and cached. I am unsure if I should give Kudos to the Spammers or a Bad Monkey award to the Google Spam team, as this application seems to being doing the job nicely on that end of things (where can I get a copy?). I really didnt look into the rankings, but from what I can see the juice is being directed elsewhere for the most part with a few of the networks I looked at. We could play connect the dots but I have better things to be doing and that's not the point.  Get the Spam-O-Matic today! I am uncertain if this is all the same bloke, but I really doubt it, as I had a run around Domain Tools on a variety of the sites I came up with and they vary in the network structures and set up. I think there are some knobs out there that have been sold a Spamming package that is full of some obvious footprints. Now if these are YOUR sites, dont go getting all steamed at me though, if some one hadnt decided to scrape content from a very visible SEO blog, these networks would still be invisible. They arent all that well hidden anyway
bah humbug! Try again. So the next time you choose an industry to scrape, stay away from the Search Industry as there are cranky old fishheads like me that could come along and slap your store-bought, footprint laden, Spam-o-matic networks for being so cheeky. Really, if it wasnt Tims site, I wouldnt have cared
or maybe I am just jealous no one scraped mine
naaawww
its the cranky Ol Man part.. :0) /rant
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I find it amazing how much work however automated people will go to with scraping for so little reward, well I say so little they must make something or they wouldn't do it.
Ultimately we just have to live with it, that said the occasional outing never did anyone any harm though I do tend to leave them alone unless they are having an adverse effects on my rankings. Though the fact that Google is caching them is testimony I think to how in Google haste (excuse the pun) to speed up crawl and display time particularly on the blog search they did so at the cost of more stringent checks. That said such results don't stay in for long so the Google spam team must be doing something.