More on AdSense Splogs

Four more pingbacks from feedscrapers today!

After writing my two splogging-related posts this morning, I went for a flight with some clients. Just got back a while ago. And what do I find in my e-mail inbox? Four more splog pingbacks!

I also found a message from Jim Mitchell, responding to an e-mail I’d sent him earlier in the day. He included a link to a blog post on MaxPower that provides two good methods for stopping AdSense sploggers. I’m going through it now. But the thing I wanted to share was this explanation of what splogging is, for those of you who have no idea what I’ve been whining about all day.

From Stopping Adsense Splogs & Spammers: Methods that Work on MaxPower:

Imagine searching for something or other on the Internet and arriving at a webpage chocked full of ads and stuffed with the exact keyword you were searching for. The page is of no help because it contains no content of value. Some guy somewhere, created a website that sucks keywords / newstories / content from other websites using RSS, inserted the right keywords to maximize profit from Adsense, and waited for Google to index and rank it high enough for you stumble upon it. Once at the page, the spammer (or spamdexer) hopes that you will click on one of the Adsense ads that seem helpful compared to the rest of the useless random text. This practice of spamdexing wastes your time, its annoying, and you can fight back.

If you’ve seen this on your blog, follow the above link to the MaxPower article to see what you can do about it.

Six Improvements For Your Blog

From lifehack.org

Interested in a few basic blog improvements? Chris Brogan’s article should give you some ideas.

From Six Improvements to Your Blog on lifehack.org:

I’ve done a lot of blog surfing lately, in search of new (best) blogs. What I found often, however, was that there are things people could do to improve the relationship and interaction value of their blogs, which would in turn build a better bridge between blogs and their readers.

Chris’s six tips are extremely basic, with advice that includes formatting posts to make them more legible and making it easy for readers to contact you. I don’t agree with everything said — for example, the contact advice doesn’t work for me and I don’t see anything wrong with captchas if they prevent comment spam — but it’s a good look at some things you may be able to do to improve your blog overall.

Does anyone have any other tips they might want to share with readers? Use the Comments link here.

Rewarding Reader Participation

Because reading blogs should not be a spectator sport.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m blogging to myself. I know I’m not — the stats show more than 3,000 page views a week here, which isn’t too shabby. But the people who stop by seem to read (or browse) and hurry on their way without offering any feedback on what they’ve read.

Now everyone has an opinion and I like to think that everyone has additional insight they can share on many topics. That’s what the Comments links are for. So, in an effort to encourage comments from readers, I’ve decided to experiment with a little giveaway.

At January month-end, I’ll give away one of my books to a randomly selected commenter who posted a comment on one of my January 2007 posts. The book is reader’s choice from currently available titles. If this little reward program is successful at getting site visitors to participate with useful, insightful comments, I’ll continue the program for each month with similar rewards.

Keep in mind that this applies to comments posted using the Comments link for a particular post on this site. (Feedback submitted via contact form is not eligible.) The comment must pass muster with our spam prevention software, so if you comment and your comment doesn’t appear within 48 hours, it’s likely that its content was considered spam.

What do you think about this? Don’t keep it to yourself. Use the Comments link.