I am getting incredibly tired of reputation management spam. Yes, like many of you, I track what people are saying about me, my blog and my company. I use various methods, including Google blog search. I have written about this time and time again but the spam is getting to be too much.
Here is an example. A search on rustybrick and Google Blog search returns these five results, amongst some others:
If you click through to any of them, they have no mention of "rustybrick" in the page text or in the page source. I assume these are coming up because people are just tagging content with "rustybrick." Why? Maybe to get my attention? Or maybe I am hallucinating?
This also works for my blog and my name.
Comments
Actually, it's may be a sign of your success :)
Every now and then Google News tests 'broad matching'. If I search for the brand name of the company I work for I can sometimes get articles on some of our biggest competitors instead. There's no mention of us anywhere.
Perhaps Google Blogsearch is doing the same thing. I'm writing this without even doing a scrap of research or investigation - just brain dumping my first thought onto you.
I think it's also equally likely that external content (tags or just links to the blog page) might be enough to get some content to rank for your unique n-gram!
Posted by: Andrew Girdwood | March 4, 2008 10:18 AM
We understand where you are coming from as recently we found a few of those too. I suppose it could be a sign of success but needless to say, it's quite annoying eh?
Posted by: Brick Marketing | March 4, 2008 11:16 AM
You're both very prolific and very popular and the scrapers are scraping you much more than most folks...I think everyone who publishes to the web deals with this to some degree.
Posted by: Todd Mintz | March 4, 2008 11:42 AM