T_W’s last post linked to a salient post which showed charts of Internet traffic for certain phrases, with a fascinating plunge for a fortnight in early November. He did post this yesterday.

I looked at Technorati’s authority for salient. He wasn’t credited with a visible recent link from our blog – despite getting a clear link from us IN THE MAIN TEXT, rather than the sidebar and despite him having made comments, which should have counted as links because we strip the nofollow tag.

In fact, according to Technorati, salient’s last blog post was 19 days ago. I count 5 or 6 since then. But lo, I now get this when I try to re-click on the Technorati censorship newest post using the blogger “newer posts” function on the site Technorati.

Technorati’s Censorship?
expression as battle with the enemy.
Original post by salient
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 1969 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Wow. There’s a wormhole on salient’s site. He’s gone back in time. No wonder his post has disappeared. It won’t be written for nearly 40 years.

Stop, salient!! This is too dangerous. You may stop the whole Internet from getting invented, by snapping a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon.

I was going to write this as a comment on the aside I made last night, however it seems to be a bit long winded for that (not to mention, the aside was supposed to be a bit of a quick rant! 🙂 ).

The previous post, resulted in several good comments from salient, heather and Mana which are well worth reading. Following their responses, I felt there were a couple of points I wanted to clarify – mainly to make my position on the matter clear, rather than actually disagreeing with anything they have said.

First off, my rant which started this was more the result of frustration than anything else. The blogroll is excellent and it has allowed both Heather and myself to discover some excellent, well written and entertaining blogs we would have otherwise missed. When this blog first joined it, we got two excellent advantages from membership:

1. Every time some one on the blogroll made a post, Technorati granted a “link” (authority) to our blog if we were visible on their blogroll widget. It was this which propelled us from almost no technorati “authority” to dizzying heights (albeit short lived).
2. Every time we made new posts, the **New next to our name drove traffic to our site. This resulted in lots of new traffic for the site, new readers, new commenters and new posts agreeing / disagreeing with our own.

Over time, Technorati removed the first advantage and now it seems Blogrolling are in the process of removing the second advantage. Over the last few days, the blogroll widget we display in the sidebar has done nothing but direct traffic away from our blog to other blogs (according to Feedburner outgoing links stats) – as we have not shown up on anyone else’s pages we have had no inbound traffic.

In reality, for the last three days now the blogroll has really been nothing but a free linking service to other atheist blogs. While I don’t really have a problem with that, it is a touch annoying that there is no reciprocation and, more importantly, we have no say (here at WhyDontYou) over which atheist blogs get linked to. As it stands, we would be better off replacing the blogrolling blogroll with a static blogroll where we chose which blogs were listed (note: at the moment, we have both).

While I am not, at the moment, thinking of removing the blogroll from here (and I wouldn’t advocate others remove it either – it is a good thing!), I do hope that someone with the requisite technical knowledge can come up with a solution to the problems. There must be a sufficiently IT literate atheist out there (or are they all on the sites which seem to always be on the blogroll!)

As further clarification, in my previous aside I was being very subjective when I complained that the good blogs seem to be missed out by the blogroll. I was, in an angry and frustrated manner, trying to complain that (often) if you visit all 25 blogs from the blogroll which should have “new” posts (i.e. are marked **New), you often find little more than a YouTube clip with no commentary or even no new posts. Yes, there are some brilliant blogs on the blogroll which I make the effort to visit as often as I remember, but there are a few that are barely readable.

In a nutshell (sorry for being longwinded about this!), the biggest thing which annoys me is the erratic nature of it all. For example, Pharyngula (an excellent blog) seems to be permanently on the blogroll (*) – which is understandable as he makes ten posts for every one a mere mortal can generate. However, WhyDontYou hasn’t been seen on it for the last three days, despite us having half a dozen new posts. I am sure there is no specific discrimination against this particular blog, I just wish I could work out how to solve it…

As a related aside, salient has an excellent post where he has looked at technorati stats for various words. Well worth checking out, and it seems to identify a global, significant, drop in blog traffic over the period 11 – 17 Nov. This is mirrors in the stats for visitors here, they plummeted around this period. Did the internet break for a few days?

—

(*) Comically, I have just looked and for the first time in ages, Pharyngula isn’t on the blogroll. Bah. Toutatis and Loki have conspired together to make me look silly. Hopefully he will be back before you read this… 🙂

Hah, I lied. I was using one of the top x ways to get people to look at a post.

(There must be lots of people who think – “Ah, 5 secrets of reaching new customers? That’s an interesting number. Not too many for my poor little brain to take in. But big enough to have some meaningful content. And, secrets? Oooh, I love secrets! I love them so much that I will suspend the inner voice that is screaming out that, by definition, it can’t be a SECRET if it’s on the Internet.” Well, SEO experts seem to assume there are lots of these people. :-D)

In fact, there’s only one evil trick that I’m going to bitch about here.

Blog comment spam goes with the blog commenting territory. Akismet is pretty good at stopping most of it, at a cost of losing a few real comments. Otherwise, if we are too stupid to see the difference between a real person and an advert for some spurious Internet products embedded with links to online pharmaceutical sales, we don’t deserve to stop them. Maybe its some sort of Turing test game spammers are playing, examining our capacity to tell whether we are interacting with a human or machine .

Standard comment spam now half-heartedly tries to convince you it’s from a human by saying things like “I loved reading about Whydontyoublog though I can’t say I understand all of it” (I stupidly deleted a good few of these, just before I decided to write this, so no direct quotes. My bad.) Obviously, if you hadn’t seen the same words in a few dozen spams, and if the “insert blog name here” bit made sense – unlike in our examples – you might let this through.

Other ones are from scrapers. I really don’t care if scrapers take our text and present it in sometimes comically inappropriate situations.

The ones for “jokes” scrapers used to be entertaining in themselves. The blog would have a righteous rant about something and say something like “They must be joking” talking about Uncommon Descent or some such unfunny creationist nonsense. A Jokes scraper would spot the “joking” keyword and put the post on its Jokes sites. If there was anyone reading them who expected a punchline to these posts, they must still be waiting.

Indeed, we would sometimes deliberately used the J word just to see how unfunny an atheist rant had to be to avoid getting scraped. We never found a limit. The jokes scrapers just seem to have withered away.

However, these scrapers couldn’t do us any discernible harm. A few sites with no real content seemed just a waste of somebody else’s Internet bandwidth.

But their next-gen offspring really annoy me. These do the same thing but with a subtle difference. They attribute the post they’ve taken and stuck on their blog to somebody else. These sites say things like “romanianbride wrote an interesting post today” and follow it with a post from my/your blog.

You blink in disbelief a few times. You think “Wow, what an amazing coincidence, romanianbride also had an argument about atheism with her son Xavier’s teacher today and met her fundy neighbour Mr Roberts in the supermarket and had to have her cat CuddlySnowballIII dewormed. And she’s written about it in the exact same words as I did!” (Well, assuming that’s your blog content…)

I started out thinking this doesn’t matter, given that it’s not as if we want our noms de blog used anyway and that it’s unlikely that anyone would visit these scrapers except by mistake.

But it does matter a bit. It matters in terms of Google rank for a start. One of the things search engine spiders look for is “uniqueness of content.” If your blog has the same content as half a dozen scrapers – at least some of which will be phishing traps and/or pathways to online sales of probably fake pharmaceuticals, casinos or pr0n – how are the search engine spiders and spam detecting algorithms supposed to know that your site is legit? Your blog starts to look like just another scraper site. In fact, it doesn’t matter if Akismet bins the spam that announces this to you. It’s already damaged your reputation. Giving them the spurious “authority” of a link from your comments, if you use “follow”, is not going to hurt you any more.

Looking for some subtle way to strike back, I first thought of posting the IPs of every one of them here. Bah, way too naive a solution. I followed up some of these IPs using a map lookup IP program. They were pretty clearly spoofed or wireless drive-by linkages. Unless, that is, there really are people, universities and companies so dumb that they steal and misattribute other people’s content, but still operate their legitimate blogs and websites from those addresses. Not likely is it? So, I won’t post the IPs of these people, who are most likely to be victims themselves.

That being my first thought, I don’t have a second. I will try to find a suitable response though, in my quarter-skilled way and post it here if I ever come up with any reasonable suggestions.
If anyone else knows a solution, please let us know.