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Well it looks like the Technorati favorites spammers that Darren and I posted about earlier have developed new ways to compete with the likes of Akismet…

Blog spammers have now made thousands of fake “proxy blogs” to be able to mass-friend one main blog to rank it in the most popular section on the Technorati homepage, ultimately sending the blogs lots of traffic and a few strong backlinks.

Pill spammers are now the 99th, 95th, 83rd, 10th, and even the 3rd most popular blog in the world! I really hope this new idea does not take off like the previous one did, as that would make the top 100 page completely useless. It seems like Technorati has done nothing to thwart these spammers so far and I doubt that they will do anything soon.

One very large problem that a lot of blogs have (or will soon have) to deal with automated blogs that steal your blog posts and post them on their blog. The process is entirely automated and a great post that takes you three hours to write, they duplicate in 5 seconds. If Google would then view their blog before yours, they would rank higher in Google and your blog would get penalized for duplicate content!

The auto blogs steal your content by fetching the data from your RSS feeds, so here is where we can patch the problem. The oldest quick-fix was to add a RSS footer on every blog post that linked to your blog (Such as: “Copyright 2008 Blog Marketing Blog“). This is certainly better than having no footer at all, but recently Matt Cutts (A Google employee) stated that the best solution is to have the syndicated (or in this case, stolen) content link to the original article.

Matt Cutts: I would recommend the linking to the original article on the author’s site. The reason is: imagine if you have written a good article and it is so nice that you have decided to syndicate it out. Well, there is a slight chance that the syndicated article could get a few links as well, and could get some PageRank. And so, whenever Google bot or Google’s crawl and indexing system see two copies of that article, a lot of the times it helps to know which one came first; which one has higher PageRank.

So if the syndicated article has a link to the original source of that article, then it is pretty much guaranteed the original home of that article will always have the higher PageRank, compared to all the syndicated copies. And that just makes it that much easier for us to do duplicate content detection and say: “You know what, this is the original article; this is the good one, so go with that.”

In my opinion, I would want every blog that steals my content to link back to the source (so Google gives extra authority to MY post, not theirs), as well as giving me an anchor text link to my homepage. Go to your wordpress includes folder and make a backup of feed-rss2.php. Now, open the file in notepad and do a control find for “<?php the_content() ?>” without the quotes (It is on line 39 for me).

Add the following code right after the “?>” but before the “]]”

<p><a href=”<?php the_guid(); ?>”>Permalink</a> - <a href=”http://mixedmarketarts.com”>Blog Marketing Blog</a></p>

Now I used my own blog URL as an example, so you should change that to your own link. For every person that steals your blogs content now, they will have a permalink back to the source (your blog), as well as a link to your blog homepage.

I would like to thank Stephan for the Matt Cutts interview and Blogstorm for the PHP code. There is also supposedly a plugin that does these two things, but at the time of the posting, the blog is offline.   (Update: the plugin is back online!)

Spammers are and will always exist. I have received over 900 comment spams, generally from casinos and pharmaceutical companies looking to sell their [(via)gra and other p(ills)] (I’m not spelling the words so that I don’t rank in Google for any related long tail keywords and get millions more spam comments) .

Akismet does a great job at weeding out spam blog comments, and to keep up with the evolving antispam techniques, the spammers have started joining Technorati and adding top blogs as favorites. This allows them to show up on high traffic blog pages without having to be approved by the blogger.

I noticed this new evolution of spam only a few minutes ago when I was looking at John Chow’s Technorati Page and saw that 90% of the blogs on his “recent” favorites were promoting the link spam we all know and hate. Here is a screenshot:

The Technorati favorites (aka Fans) are not required to be approved, so it is quite a smart tactic for promotion. Hopefully Technorati will start adding more security features to stop things like this, because I do not want my listings to be filled with spam. I believe that once more spammers realize this is a free opportunity for more traffic, they will all join in on the bandwagon. Fighting and promoting spam is a never ending arms race… and I don’t think it will ever stop.

Update: Every single blog on the top 100 has been hit…

Paid Paragraph:

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 Update: Looks like its set to private now,  oh well!

The SEO Blackhat Forums which normally cost $100/month to see are now free during Christmas according to their most recent blog post. If you are into unethical blackhat search engine optimizing, you can go register for their forums and skim over everything before it locks again (sometime tonight) and begins charging $100/m again.

I would never pay $100/m to join a forum when I am sure the majority of the material is on other forums for free, but I will gladly sign up and browse when the getting is good! They did not say if the free registration ended exactly at midnight, all they said was “for the next couple hours,” so you best hurry if you want a sneak peak.