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Web Spam 101: Blog Farms and Copy Swapping

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 1, 2007 in Web spam

A link farm is any collection of Web sites where all the member sites link to all the other member sites. The classic link farm implementation calls for each site to have a “links” page that is reachable from the root URL. All the linking is done from “links” page to root URLs.

Of course, people have found a million ways to cheat the system. I’ve seen people only link back to the other sites’ “links” pages, I’ve seen them link back through Javascript, Flash, from within iframes, and using “rel=’nofollow’”. Virtually any linking method that Google says it won’t honor has been abused to cheat people of link love.

Is it any wonder that link farms are not well-regarded in the Webmastering community?

So then why are people becoming so enamored with blog farms? The chief difference between a blog farm and a link farm is that the blog farm tends to embed the swapped links either in blogrolls (making them site-wide links) or in the body of individual blog posts (ensuring XML distribution and potential replication across thousands of other sites).

Blog farming is more aggressive and malicious than link farms because the blog farmers are assuming that Google inherently trusts blogs more than static Web sites (which is not true, but that SEO myth will have to be debunked another day). Blog farming is built on the premise that Google won’t take a closer look at a form of Web content that it seems to trust. Hence, people become more blatant with their manipulative linking.

Spammers created the idea with what I have called frog blogs, which are networks of blogs that the spammers link together and post content to in sequence (thinking of a frog hopping from lily pad to lily pad in a circular pattern). The problem with a frog blog is that it requires constant attention. You post to Blog A, then you refer to your Blog A post on Blog B, then you refer to your Blog B post on Blog C, then you refer to your Blog C post on Blog A, and you start the circle all over again.

That’s just inefficient. Spammers fell in love with the mush blog, where they set up robots to scrape text from other blogs, from forums, from news alerts (that auto-posting through email came in handy, didn’t it?), etc. and create small posts. Some of the mush blogs are pretty sophisticated and a few of them have lasted for several years. Most of the mush blogs I come across these days are already deleted (since the majority of them are built on Blogger).

Mush blogs do give out link love freely (well, usually). Frog blogs are not that link friendly. But it seems to me that one of the latest spam techniques is what I’ll call copy swapping. You write an article and place it on my site. I write an article and place it on your site. We both include tag lines in the footers of our articles to link home.

Voila! We have “natural” reciprocal links. But how do you automate that process? Well, Web site reviews are one way. Just review your own site and start swapping self-written reviews with other people. Be careful not to swap with anyone who has swapped with other people in your swap circle.

Copy swapping doesn’t have to limit itself to Web site reviews. You can swap press releases, how-to articles, blog posts, (auto)biographies, etc. Any point of information to which you can devote 200-400 words and attach a link back to your site should be good enough for 1,000 copy swapping partners.

The pattern actually emerged from relatively benigh sources. People began signing up for multiple forums with the same screen names and profiles several years ago. People hoping to cash in on the free article craze submitted the same badly written articles to multiple directories. People with no news to report submitted the same boring, uninformative press releases to multiple press release distribution services. And so.

It was only one more step for people to fall into the idea of swapping articles. The concept has been promoted for several years as “reciprocal articles”. At first glance, you are giving value for value — provided the articles are only published on one Web site each. But that’s the problem. Writing a unique article for every site from which you want a link is time-consuming. No self-respecting spammer would do that.

Not to worry. There is software out there that will generate 1,000 “unique” articles for you in the space of a few minutes. You plug in a few parameters and the software does the rest for you. It’s a great time saver.

Think the search engines care how many places they find the same basic text? Why should they? All they have to do is pick one copy to satisfy any particular query, and you really only want the link anchor text anyway (real spammers don’t care about PageRank — they just want something that helps them rank).

An easier way to get that free link love, however, is simply to write the content for your own site. Other people will steal it and use it on their sites. Some of them will link back to you. You look good because your site consists solely of original content. You’re not linking back to mush blogs, blog farms, link farms, copy swappers, etc. You’re just minding your own business and you have no control over who steals your content.

That is actually how I’ve gotten some of my links through the years. Think of it as copy baiting. You write an interesting article and someone decides they want to use it on their Web site. As long as you get proper link credit, why should you care? I have often asked people to remove my content from their sites. I have also often agreed to let people republish part of my content provided they give proper credit.

I don’t ask people to use my content. I’m just open to reasonable requests. They have their friends and networks of Web buddies who all link to their sites and I get a little bit of that link love (you know, PageRank) along with some possibly useful anchor text.

Most importantly, I get visibility that I could not otherwise buy or build.

The copy swappers won’t be going away any time soon. Nor will the blog farms, which seem to just be starting to take off. How long any of this stuff will work for these people is anyone’s guess.

But spam is spam and I know it when I see it. These days, I still see quite a lot of Web spam. It’s just looking more sophisticated than it used to.