I keep a vanity Google Blog search in my RSS reader, and lately I’ve noticed a bunch of new splog entries – I think that’s what they are – that quote my book. They always quote the same passage from my book, and then mention perfumes. Like this:
John Battelle’s new book says the interface of commerce is changing, and Google’s poised to control it. Unfortunately, I need to be careful with it as a replacement bottle is not easy to come by. NAVY Perfume by Coty DUSTING POWDER 4.
The links never resolve to anything, but this is a sample link:
http://www.mumble-4.info/perfume/?p=484
http://www.mumble-4.info/ looks to be a splog directory. But there’s no content.
I’ll admit I am not sure how this helps a splogger. Any insights from my smarter-than-me readership?
they are “uniqifying” the text in hopes of not being flagged as dupe content.
When I was weeding out spam for my last company, the vast majority of it pointed to .info domains, which I think was because they are (were?) so cheaply available.
Like graywolf said, they are trying to make unique text to make it less likely to be flagged by Google for duplicate content and eliminated from the index. This helps them to drop links in their splogs with the aim of their target website ranking higher. Plus any incidental traffic they might get from the splogs and the random text.
I see a lot of this in Google Blog Search — it doesn’t seem to have many filters to detect this stuff and not show it.