Winter Olympics fans were dazzled in 2006 by the performance of Shani Davis, the first African American speed skater to make the Olympic team. Davis went on to win gold and silver medals and set a number of world records.

Earlier, in 2002, after failing to qualify for the US team, news reports said Cherie Davis, Shani’s mother, fired off allegations of racism among the speed skating community, calling them “white supremacists” and “neo-Nazi genetic mutation.”

A few bloggers appearing in Google’s search results point to the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune as first reporting the allegations, based on undisclosed emails, but currently only Australian outlet The Age appears to be running the original article, written by George Diaz in 2006.

However, these publications do not appear to be in Ms. Davis’s crosshairs, perhaps because they don’t appear as the number one search result when querying for information about her. Instead, the top spot belongs to now deceased Blogspot blogger Sean Healy, on a sports blog titled UnknownColumn. More “mainstream” reports about the allegations do not appear.

In the suit, Davis demands Google remove a blog post from February of 2006, published two days after the aforementioned The Age article. Davis claims the post is defamatory and that she never made such statements about the US Speedskating Federation. She claims Healy refused to take down the offending post and now that Healy is deceased, her only recourse is to ask Google to remove it.

The post is a bit scathing, and the author refers to Davis as “a petulant, ill-willed, flame war-starting psycho bitch,” which likely doesn’t sit well with the plaintiff, especially since this is the first bit of commentary one discovers when googling her name.

Legal experts have been quick to express their doubt about the likely success of the suit as there are a number of things in Google’s favor. First, Google enjoys the protection of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online service providers from liability for third party content.

Secondly, defamation cases have to prove what was said was false and that the author knowingly published false information. Even if the blogger in question wasn’t deceased, the alleged false statements attributed to Davis were published first by prominent news organizations, and these prior publications are the likely sources. As for whether Davis is “a petulant, ill-willed, flame war-starting psycho bitch,” matters of opinion are protected speech, which is probably why these words aren’t mentioned in the lawsuit.

Thirdly, in the case of who now owns and is ultimately liable for content on the UnknownColumn blog, it isn’t Google. The new owner by default is either Healy’s next of kin or whomever Healy may have bequeathed it to. Whoever that is hasn’t shown much interest as the blog hasn’t been updated since before Healy’s death. 

Lastly, in the state of Illinois, where the suit was filed, defamation and libel claims are to be made within one year of publication, but more than three years have elapsed.  

We’ll start with the slightly disquieting stuff.  On the WebmasterWorld forum, "dhirajch" writes, "I think it is not always.  but yes definetly much more faster than any website."

The other less-than-assuring piece of information comes from Ted Ulle, who states, "Without any external links, google is not likely to index any site, whether it’s a blog or not.  They’re definitely not likely to keep in the index for very long even, if they do discover the url somehow."

But people like "IncrediBILL" and Tamar Weinberg, along with at several others, have said there’s little to worry about.  Several examples were given in which Blogspot or WordPress sites showed up in Google’s search results either quickly or without any effort on the author’s part.

In the end, maybe it’s best to toss a few outside links into a piece to make sure.  Also, all the other usual SEO tips are liable to help, as well.  But it seems like no special actions are necessary (and no anxiety is in order) when trying to get a new blog indexed by Google.

This year, 68 percent of the biggest online retailers sent at least one promotional email on Cyber Monday, making it the largest email marketing day of the year to date, a 44 percent rise over last year.

"I think one of the big reasons that it is up this year is that retailers are making a really big push to bring the retail sales early this year, because of the instability in the economy," Chad White, founder of RetailEmail.Blogspot and director of retail insights at the Email Experience Council, told DM News. "Retailers are using e-mail to help this."

Twenty-five percent of the largest online retailers sent at least one promotional email on the Sunday before Cyber Monday, which made it the biggest Sunday for email marketing this year, an increase of 12 percent over last year.

"It’s another selling occasion in the early core of the holiday season," White said. "Its close to Black Friday, so it is feeding off of it, and the term Cyber Monday is accepted by consumers, so they are more open to it."

Last year, Cyber Monday was the sixth busiest day of the year for online retailers to send emails. It was surpassed by two of the three Echo Mondays, Mondays after Cyber Monday but before Christmas. In December and the day after Christmas had the most retailers sending promotional email, at 53 percent.

"Last year, Echo Mondays saw a higher amount of e-mails, so we expect to see more e-mails on these Mondays this year," White said. "There is something magical about Mondays for retail sales during the holidays."

You might be interested to know that Google Israel was compelled by our local court to disclose Blogger.com blogger IP address. Google agreed to supply the information, but not before the court suggested that the same blogger would be given a chance to respond to the motion anonymously.

It was agreed Google will disclose the IP address to court’s eyes only and only if the blogger wouldn’t respond, the IP would be provided to the plaintiff. The blogger didn’t respond (he got the message, according to Google) and the motion was granted.

Anyway, the blogger was accused of slander

(The American Heritage Dictionary defines “slander” as “Oral communication of false statements injurious to a person’s reputation” as well as “A false and malicious statement or report about someone.”)

Aren’t Google’s Blogspot servers located in the US, though?

In other recent news, a court in the US decided that a Blogspot blogger nick-named “Ortho Mom” may remain anonymous.

[Thanks Slav Ben Ari!]

Comments

Ortho Mom tells me that at first, she didn’t know Google was probed for her identity, until she was tipped off by a reader who read about it in the NY Daily News. That’s when Ortho Mom tried to contact Google several times, she says, with no response from them. And that’s when she decided to get an attorney to represent her.

About a week later, according to Ortho Mom, Google via their Legal Support department sent the following email to her – with the mail sent out on February 21st, and the court date being February 22nd:

Google has received a Order to Show Cause for information related to your account, Pamela Greenbaum v. Google, Inc., d/b/a/ Blogger and Blogspot.com , Supreme Court of the State of New York for the County of New York (…)

To comply with the law, Google intends to provide responsive documents, unless you inform us that you will file a motion to quash the subpoena or other formal objection.

For more information about the Order to Show Cause, you may wish to contact the party seeking this information at: (…)

Unfortunately, Google is not in a position to provide you with legal advice.

If you have other questions regarding the subpoena, we encourage you to contact your attorney.

Ortho Mom asked Google for a postponement to no avail. She tells me: “They instead signed a stipulation in which they agreed to produce docs pertaining to my identity unless an attorney representing me showed up by a set date. Luckily, I had already lined up an attorney well before I was even informed by Google that there was even a suit.” She adds, “What was unbelievable was that they actually directed me to call the lawyer who was filing the suit to uncover my identity! As if that is an advisable move in a case such as this.”

Google also didn’t send Ortho Mom any papers, but she had to use a service to retrieve them, she says. Neither did Google respond to her response to their “notice” mail, so Ortho Mom says she was left in the dark in terms of knowing whether Google had received her message notifying them she intended to fight Order to Show Cause.

According to Ortho Mom, it turns out that Google actually didn’t merely comply with laws when preparing to give up their user’s privacy – they did less. “The judge actually criticized Google for not following the correct procedure,” Ortho Mom says, “The judge criticized Google in the decision, where she outlined what should have been the proper procedure in a footnote.”

Google was not available for comment so far, but I only contacted them yesterday – should they reply I will post an update with Google’s view on things.

Comments

A lawsuit intended to unmask the blogger known as “Orthomom” has failed, preserving a closely guarded secret of the online world.

Former Lawrence School Board trustee Pamela Greenbaum, once a frequent target of commenters on the site, filed suit against Google, which hosts the Orthomom blog, seeking the blogger’s name. Her intent, she said, was to file a lawsuit directly against the writer of the blog, who she claimed had called Greenbaum a bigot and anti-semite.

New York State Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman disagreed, writing in an eight page decision dated October 23, 2007, that, “The relief sought by Greenbaum, on the eve of a school board election, would have a chilling effect on protected political speech.” The judge also found that a commenter on the blog, not the blogger, had used the term bigot which, in any event, the judge found, was protected speech.

  Some bloggers say that Google stood up for the privacy of their users this time, as opposed to another recent case in India that made news. The blogger called Orthomom herself sees things a bit differently, writing a piece on the court ruling in the Jewish Star (my emphasis):

If it hadn’t been for a tip from a concerned reader, the case quietly filed against Google by Pamela Greenbaum to have me unmasked might have been over before it started. One day I’m happily blogging along between carpool runs, the next I’m looking for a good First Amendment lawyer. And it was a good thing I managed to procure once, as I soon found out that Google, Inc. was not prepared to do much in the way of defending me against the false and frivolous claims presented by Ms. Greenbaum and her attorney.

 Orthomom adds that the US Supreme Court had ruled before that anonymous free speech must be protected. “It is crucial to the free exchange of ideas, whithout any fear of reprisals or retribution for holding opinions that are potentially unpopular,” she says.

[Thanks Tadeusz Szewczyk!]

Comments

He may also have a bridge for sale.

The new Blogspot blog for the booted blogger is Facebook Secrets Again, where the texts of the DMCA notices were posted for all who really care. You’re reading this, so you must.

TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington says he’s not sure if the DMCA really applies in this situation, but what blogger’s going to fight Google or Facebook on it? (Plus, Arrington could be very wrong.)

He writes:

…the leak provided information to potential hackers as to potential security holes, and the fact that Facebook accidentally released the code themselves on their site may have made it very difficult for them to claim protection under the law.

I’m no lawyer and this may be stupid to say. But does that logic apply to content as well? If allow a book to be viewed on my website, even without a copyright notice, could someone claim the distribution rights?

It may be a more difficult case to prove in court without going through the proper copyright channels, but I think a judge might err on the side of the author in that case.

Google Asked To Reveal Blogger Identity

And Google says they’ll do it, too, if the court says so, at a cost to the petitioner of $75 per hour. "Orthomom," the blogger in question, has until April 5 to file an objection.

The full details of this case are not so interesting – it’s a local school board cat fight. As the son of two public school teachers, I can speak from experience that these things, more often than not, devolve into bloodthirsty, political cheap shots. So I’ll spare you the background.

But the case again brings up the important question of what constitutes libel, the limits of free expression, and the right of anonymity. More specifically, it addresses these issues as they pertain to blogs, forums, social networks, and websites.

An important fact up front is that Orthomom made none of the questionable comments. Yet, Pamela Greenbaum, the offended school board member is seeking to have her identity revealed as well, in order to file a defamation lawsuit.

Greenbaum is petitioning Google to release data and/or printouts identifying the person responsible for the blog, including registration records, renewal, and IP addresses, and also data identifying the person(s) attributed to "Anonymous."  

On January 11, 2007, following a heated local debate involving public and private schools, some of the Long Island Orthodox Jewish community, 300,000 of which it is claimed follow Orthomom’s blog, began hurling insults directed at Greenbaum.

These insults included anonymous statements like:

_{Pam Greenbaum is a bigot and really should not be on the board.}

greenbaum is not to be believed

If history is a guide, She will make it a dirty campaign, so be prepared.

Pam Greenbaum, refusing to ever agree with an Orthodox Jew, now opposes protecting children.

Orthomom and her attorney have put forth a few arguments against Greenbaum’s demands, not the least of which is that Orthomom herself never made the comments, and that, as a provider of an online forum, she is protected from actionable third-party comments by the oft-cited Section 230 of the US Code.

In a subsequent blogpost, Orthomom defends herself this way:

The bottom line is that an anonymous commenter calling someone a "bigot’ in an an anonymous forum is simply not defamatory… The statement is clearly one of opinion, not fact, and it is further tempered by the fact that an anonymous commenter is not considered a credible source by the vast majority of readers.

In addition, the bar is even higher to prove a statement as defamatory when one takes into account that Ms. Greenbaum is a public official, as the commenter would have had to show malice – which is legally defined as "falsity or reckless disregard of the truth".

And it’s difficult to prove malice, if the statement is an opinion, which everyone, in the US at least, is entitled to. For precedent, let’s look at an opinion statement as it has been questioned in the past. There are a number of words to examine, like "ugly" or "racist," but the host of the blog Krum As A Bagel wins the prize for libel research with a legal explanation of "dumb ass":

A statement that the plaintiff is a "Dumb Ass," even first among "Dumb Asses," communicates no factual proposition susceptible of proof or refutation… depending on context, it may convey a lack less of objectively assayable mental function than of such imponderable and debatable virtues as judgment or wisdom.

Here defendant did not use "dumb" in isolation, but as part of the idiomatic phrase, "dumb ass." When applied to a whole human being, the term "ass" is a general expression of contempt essentially devoid of factual content. Adding the word "dumb" merely converts "contemptible person" to "contemptible fool."

Plaintiffs were justifiably insulted by this epithet, but they failed entirely to show how it could be found to convey a provable factual proposition. … If the meaning conveyed cannot by its nature be proved false, it cannot support a libel claim.

So yes, you can, legally call someone a dumb ass, or pretty much any other vague insult.

Paul Alan Levy, attorney for Orthomom, probably says it best though, as he pushes for dismissal (which most seem to think is likely):

The right to criticize anonymously on the Internet is a fundamental free speech right and an important tool for whistleblowers and consumers who speak out about the misconduct or corruption of big companies or public figures.

Those who want to intimidate their critics with the threat of identification, but who have no real basis for suing, should learn from this case that they cannot file suit and then expect to withdraw if the critics are ready to fight back. Companies and powerful individuals who try this trick should be prepared for the financial consequences.

Which, I take to mean, there will be a countersuit. Should be interesting to watch.

But I’m going to try and get some advice out to a few more people now. And this is going to be the toughest task I’ve had in a while. You see it never dawned on me that so many folk would be on hosted blogs. Let’s just say that optimising Blogspot is not a straight forward task.

As a result I’m amalgamating the site reviews for all Blogspot blogs into one post. Apologies, but BlogSpot limits much help I can give to these hosted blogs. Here’s the post navigation to make life easier for you.

Internal navigation (this is another mammoth post)

General topics:

1. Taking Control – getting your own domain
2. Blog titles and META tags
3. Best use of the Header tag
4. Using blog categories to theme your site
5. Linking to other blogs and content
6. Keep comments on the same page

Site-specific topics:

1. bocktherobber.blogspot.com
2. twentymajor.blogspot.com
3. elblogador.blogspot.com
4. skinflicks.blogspot.com
5. theangrydome2.blogspot.com
6. greeninkpen.blogspot.com

The Blogspot Conumdrum

I’m going to jump to what I hope is a logical assumption – if you asked for some SEO advice you must be passionate about blogging. So in that vain I’ll try to offer advice that might help your blogging careers:

1. Taking Control

   If you are really serious about blogging the best advice I can give you is to take it to the next level. Hosted blog platforms are a fantastic way to get started. You don’t need much technical know how, and you can be up and blogging in a flash. There are downsides however, and the natural progression is to buy yourself a domain and publish to your own blog.

   Before I go any further I better give a warning: This isn’t a trivial matter. You will need some technical prowess (or borrow someone for a few hours to help you out).

   A search for blog hosting Ireland returns hosting with a free domain name for €42.99 p.a. That’s fairly reasonable, and you’ll find that WordPress (the same platform I publish this blog from) is highly customisable and extendible thanks to the thousands of plug-ins available. WordPress also helps you to import all your Blogger posts (beware – the new Blogger no longer supports this function. See here for more.)

   If you do decide to take the jump then many of the comments I made on the Bubble Brothers post should also be useful.

2. Blog titles and META tags

   I notice that the default title on Blogger posts are <blogtitle><posttitle>. My advice is to flip the order. It looks much better in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) because the page title is used by the search engines as the title of your listing. If you want to see what I mean go to Google and search for “site:yourblogname.blogspot.com” (stick in your own blogspot domain and remove the quotes). That should give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

   The page title is probably the most important element for on-page SEO. You really want to get some keywords into your titles. I know this can be difficult when you’re trying to write quirky titles that grab attention, but have a think about the phrase you would type into Google if you wanted to find a page like the one you’re writing. Test it out in Google – when you get relevant results you know you have good keywords (you can also use keyword tools, which I’ll describe in a follow-up post). Then try to include that phrase or words from it. You wont get it right every time, but chances are that you will get a bit more search engine love.

   Blogspot seems to have a built-in function for spitting out your META data. The main problem here is that there doesn’t appear to be any quick and easy method to create unique description and keyword elements for each page.

   A quick Google search for “blogspot meta tags” should provide a few resources to help with your META data. I wrote previously about the benefits of META Tag Optimization – you can find out how a well crafted page description, which the Search Engines use for your snippet, can increase clickthroughs and site visits.

   The other META I think you should ensure exists is the RSS link auto-discovery. If you include a META link to your feed visitors can easily add you to their reader of choice from the address bar in their browser.
   <posttitle><blogtitle>

3. Use the Header tag

   If you write long posts you should definitely break up your content with paragraphs and sub-headers. It makes life easier for your readers, but the search engines also give a wee bit more weight to content found in <h> elements. So you might find your in-page post title (not to be mixed up with your page-title, although usually the same text) will be in a <h2> element.

   If you are prone to long posts (looks in mirror) you should further break up the page with a sub-header, perhaps in a <h3> element. I use <h4> for my sub-headers and style them via CSS to my own preferences.

   Search engines will also pick up some theme signals from the text you use in your sub-headers so try to retain and extend you primary post title through the sub-header text your choose.

4. Blog categories

   Unfortunately this wont work so well for Blogspot blogs, but the category names and URLs you use also help to theme your content. If you look at my blog I include the category name in the URL and try to use descriptive anchor text to help silo and theme my content (siloing is an architecture technique used to theme areas of a website). Again, as with post titles, try to think of the terms you would use to search for the theme or category your writing about, then try to use those words as your category names.

5. Linking to other blogs and content

   If you are blogging about more serious content then it can help to link to authority content on the web. Linking to a Wikipedia article or a post by an authority blogger can help the search engines apply theme (did I mention theme already?).

   Links out also help get you traffic. You probably know about trackbacks and pings, but basically if you link to another blog you will more often than not appear as a comment in the post you linked to. If the opening sentence or two of your post is interesting you will get traffic from the trackback.

6. Keep comments on the same page

   I know that some bloggers leave the comments on a pop-up page. Personally I like to see the comments on the story page. Others may differ. But from a search engine perspective it is often better to incorporate the comments into the story page, especially if you do not have a strong back link profile. If your comments are not published on your post page then you should probably read my advice to John McWilliams on site architecture.

   I believe the way to change how Blogspot publishes your comments is Dashboard->Settings->Comments->Show comments in a pop-up window?->NO.

Some specific advice for the Blogspot bloggers

1. bocktherobber.blogspot.com

   There’s not much wrong that I can see. If i could I would exclude the search pages via a robots.txt file (or through the METAs) as these pages are turning up in the supplemental index. You could try hunting down the links that the bot is crawling to find those pages and add rel="NOFOLLOW NOINDEX" to those links.

   I cant see too many links from your site to anywhere (checked a few posts – MSN Live LinkFromDomain: operator is kaput at the minute). If you want to add relevancy and theme to your pages I would link out to related content if possible. You seem to have, how shall I put it, unique content however

2. twentymajor.blogspot.com

   In fairness Twenty didn’t ask but I said I’d drop him in the pot anyhow.

   First things first, Twenty no longer posts on Blogspot. Yippee. One convert. Twenty can now be found at www.twentymajor.net. A couple of things:

   Now that you have your own domain I would look into transferring your content if you haven’t already done so. Then take a look at my Bubble Brothers post, in particular the “Redirecting Blogspot with a 301 Redirect” section. In your case you may be able to set up the redirect, your visitors will all automatically be sent to your new blog, and, best of all, you will keep all that authority and link love you’ve built up (Twenty’s old site was a PR7 site). Whatever you do don’t let that Blogspot domain lapse.

   The other thing I would do is fix the canonical URL issue. Your new site resolves to both

   http://twentymajor.net/

   and

   http://www.twentymajor.net/

   You’ll find some more info about Canonical URL in Point 9 of my Google Best Practice article.

3. elblogador.blogspot.com

   This blog looks well and the content seems very well written. But there is one gaping issue that I can see – the bandwidth consumption. The homepage is a staggering 1.32MB. This is primarily down to the images used. You should look into compressing those images if possible because for the majority of Irish Internet users your page load times would be really off-putting. The header image (top_div.gif) alone weighs in at 55KB.

   A would reduce the number of posts on both your homepage and archive pages:

   Dashboard->Template->Page Elements->Blog Posts->Edit->(Pop-Up) Number of posts on main page
   
   And as you seem to be quite a prolific blogger:

   Dashboard->Template->Page Elements->Archive->Edit->(Pop-Up) Frequency->Daily or Weekly

   If you already on a daily frequency there’s not a lot you can tweak (apart from blogging less which isn’t really a solution).

   As a political blog I would also take a look at the post titles – some could be more descriptive in my view and could contain more accurate references to the content:

   Outrage!

   to perhaps:

   Outrage! – Mandelson Bent Over Backwards for Sinn Fein

   (Having ‘Mandelson and ‘Sinn Fein’ in title will help with post theme, but to me the idea of Peter Mandelson bending over backwards is considerably more catchy and more likely to grab my attention.)

   You seem to have a lot of posts in the supplemental index, including some fairly recent stuff. This is a it worrying, but perhaps you could try a bit more internal linking from one post to another. So in one post you might reference in an earlier post. This might help.

   The other possible solution is to leave internal links when commenting on other blogs – rather than leave your URL as

   http://elblogador.blogspot.com

   leave a post URL like

   http://elblogador.blogspot.com/2007/03/arthur-m-schlesinger.html

   Of course this will only make a difference from non-Blogger blogs, and blogs where the owner hasn’t NOFOLLOW comments.

   I suppose you could also try building a few links here and there – more backlinks will lead to more pages coming out of the supplemental index.

   There’s not a whole lot more I can add apart from taking the dive to your own host. You’re doing as good a job as you can with Blogspot.

4. skinflicks.blogspot.com

   Without sounding like a broken record, I think that quite a lot of the same issues I see with elblogador also apply here. Not so much the images, but the number of pages in the supplemental index really surprises me. You actually have a decent amount of backlinks, and I a couple of directory links in there also. If you have the time then I would keep adding a couple of directory links a week. You can find new, free, human edited directories over in the Digital Point directory sub-forum. Just a couple of directory links alongside your regular links will help. Just make sure to use appropriate anchors and deep-link (link to page other than your homepage) at every given chance. Again, my Getting into Google post might help, particularly point 6.

   If there is a way to NOFOLLOW the category labels I would do this also. In my Blogspot Dashboard (the newer version) I can edit the templates, but they are in xHTML with XML flavouring so it’s not clear to me if it is possible to manually NOFOLLOW those label links. If anyone knows how to edit in NOFOLLOWs please leave a comment.

   Otherwise I suppose your blog titles are a little generic. I would try to get some more focused keywords in there where possible. Of course this may not be appropriate for your readers – bear in mind that my advice is primarily for the Search Engines.

   Apologies I cant offer any more.

5. theangrydome2.blogspot.com

   I’m afraid it’s more of the same – lots of pages in Google’s supplemental index. Good to see you using video. I think readers like to have text content mixed up with some rich media.

   You seem to have plenty of links showing via Yahoo!, but from a quick glance there seems to be a high proportion of blogroll links (Google is only showing 1 link currently – either a glitch or they don’t like the blogroll links). If this is the case you should try to get a few editorial links (links embedded in blog posts) to mix it up a bit. In my experience embedded links will give you a far greater boost than blogroll links. Not sure how you should best go about that, but maybe try to start discussions that go back and forth between blogs.

   As with others, you have quite heavy pages – about 200KB for your homepage. You could try tweaking the default number of posts shown per page from 7 to 4 or 5 to reduce this somewhat. You might make some poor dial-up soul a bit happier.

   Again, you might find some of the general comments I made above useful when it comes to your on-page stuff like titles and headers.

6. greeninkpen.blogspot.com

   Right last Blogspot blog I’m going to look at. And again I can see about 1/3 of indexed pages in the supplemental index. I’m beginning to be at quite a loss. Google shows 32 backlinks to your site, Yahoo! shows 422 backlinks. There really doesn’t seem to me any good reason that a blog with 140 odd pages can’t be supported by those backlinks. Again I have to fall beck to a belief that Blogspot is inherently weak when it comes to search engine indexation.

   Similar issues to page size, with a 610KB payload for your homepage. Images seem to be the culprit so any attempt to reduce the image weights will certainly help you retain any dial-up visitor.

   One other thing worth mentioning – I would try to ensure that you have at least some text in most posts. I can see a couple of posts that just have an image or perhaps an image and some links. It’s nigh on impossible to rank most posts that don’t contain at least some plain text.

Conclusion

The more I look at Blogspot the more I think that there is something wrong with the architecture of that platform. When I see pages that had received Pagerank (yep, it’s only toolbar PR) that subsequently go supplemental I have to wonder whether the archive architecture is the problem. And I wonder if the problems would persist if the same blog was on WordPress or similar?

I want to apologise to the Blogspot bloggers who asked for my advice. I really hadn’t considered the implications of hosted blogs – I’m so used to viewing Blogspot as a spam platform that it didn’t dawn on me that many people actually use the platform for quality content. (I probably should mention that Blogspot is absolutely notorious for splogs and sneaky redirects. If you want proof then just head over to www.blogspot.com and check the recommended blog link bottom-left of screen. It’s NOFOLLOWed – they don’t even trust the blogs they recommend!)

Individual advice to each blogger is limited because, to be honest, you will all suffer from the same deficiencies in the Blogspot platform. My wish is that I could offer more, but the blogging platform that is Blogspot has become my nemesis. I do hope, however, that you will all find something of use in this post (and if you only read the small piece relevant to your blog I strongly advice you read the whole piece – most of this applies to all Blogspot blogs).

I hope to make some amends by publishing a guide to blog post keyword research using freely available tools. The guide should help you write posts that increase your search engine visibility. It may take me a couple of weeks to put it all together (and finish the rest of the reviews), but I will post something here ASAP.

Oh, and one final observation for this post. Is it just my imagination or do Irish bloggers tend to curse a lot?

Comments

The study (PDF – recommended reading to understand the whole) was authored by Microsoft’s Yi-Min Wang and Ming Ma, and UCD’s  Yuan Niu and Hao Chen, and their results are startling. Using their "Strider Search Ranger System," an automated spam detection system, the study authors found that:

• Blogspot and AOL Hometown domains were used for the vast majority of spammy doorway pages. At least three in four (75%) Blogspot URLs appearing in the top 50 results for commercial queries were spam, totaling 22% of all spam appearances.
• Three IP blocks accounted for huge percentages of redirection spam (links that lead to made-for-ads pages) and for spam-ads clickthrough traffic.
• Three syndicators were located most at the center of the redirection chains: LookSmart.com; FindWhat.com; and 7Search.com.
• Nearly 60% of keywords returning spam URLs were related to drugs and ringtones.

Based on that, the researchers developed what they called a five-layer double-funnel model to illustrate the sophisticated middleman/syndication circuit that matches advertisers with undesirable spammy URLs. Similar in structure to the double-helix of DNA models, there are complicated systems between end users (searchers) and advertisers.

While searchers are clicking in one direction, advertisements are coming the opposite way, as if passing on the road.

From the user side it goes:

Doorway — Redirection Domain — Aggregators — Syndicator — Advertiser

From the advertiser side it goes:

Advertiser — Syndicator — Aggregators — Redirection Domain — Doorway

That is the "Spam Double-Funnel."

The researches note that among the top ten Live Search results for "cheap ticket," three doorway pages appeared:

–http://-cheapticket.blogspot.com/
–http://sitegtr.com/all/cheap-ticket.html
–http://cheap-ticketv.blogspot.com/

Their ranking is related to comment spam in open forums, where the URLs are often posted. The URLs redirect to known-spammer domains like:

–vip-online-search.info
–searchadv.com
–webresourses.info

Surprisingly, ads for reputable online travel firm Orbitz showed up on all three spam domains. The researchers assume that Orbitz did not intend for its brand to appear in these bad neighborhoods. The same scenario played out for other well-known advertisers like Shopping.com, DealTime.com, BizRate.com, eBay, and Shopzilla.

Research showed that 60 percent of the redirection chains involved ads syndicated through LookSmart, FindWhat, and 7Search. But the sources for the majority of Web spam pages themselves came from three specific IP blocks:

• 22-25% of all spam appearances originated from IP block 209.8.25.150~209.8.25.159
• IP blocks 66.230.128.0~66.230.191.255 and 64.111.192.0~64.111.223.255 were responsible for over 100,000 spam ads, occupying the bottleneck of the spam double-funnel. The researchers say this may prove to be the best layer for attacking the search spam problem.

 The researchers conclude their study by saying:

By exposing the end-to-end search spamming activities, we hope to educate users not to click spam links and spam ads, and to encourage advertisers to scrutinize those syndicators and traffic affiliates who are profiting from spam traffic at the expense of the long-term health of the web.