What are these auto-blogs?

Factual Questions
1

I’m just not understanding this.

I run an iPod Touch and iPhone blog along with a friend of mine. We’re doing pretty well, but with success comes some strange things that I have never run across before.

One of them is a recurring theme: Pings (linkbacks from sites that link to us) from blogs that appear to be assembled by a bot. These are clearly not human-edited blogs, but rather assembled by some kind of RSS trawler that seems to subscribe to our RSS feed, grab the contents, and automatically post it in the blog.

Not that in itself isn’t particularly unusual; it’s a lazy-man’s way of collecting news items without lifting a finger. Where it gets weird is:

  1. Most of these blogs seem to have no other purpose; there are no ad banners or products or services to sell. It seems to be purely blog-oriented.

  2. Most of these blogs make up some weird name as the source and have some canned introduction that almost always reads:

Buttery Flagellum wrote an interesting post today on
Here’s a quick excerpt

…followed by the half-paragraph snippet from our RSS feed.

Note the trailing “on” where a site name should go.

Most recently, one Russian auto-blog seemed to have foregone the canned intro and phony name and instead added “Source: Android News” linked at the end of the post. (The link goes to our site, which is not called Android News, even if I do plan to start a second blog on that subject, but it won’t be called Android News either.)

Now, there are some sites that tag a blog on to some quasi-legitemate service like music downloading or some crap, but at least I know what their ulterior motive is. These others though, that appear to have no ulterior motive (they’re often hosted by Blogspot or Wordpress, have no mailicious code and can’t have ads the way they’re hosted) I have no clue about. Why are they there? What purpose do they serve? I’m having trouble believing someone would want to become a blogger and yet be so lazy about it as to use an automatic RSS trawler/poster – not in the numbers we get, which are typically dozens of pings a day. I had to disable pings in our comments to avoid the pingbacks littering up the comments sections on each post.

What are these? Why are they there? Are they harvesting IP addresses or something? Should I be concerned?

2

I think what you’re describing is called a “splog” or spam blog. They are not for collecting advertising dollars but creating cross-links to sites that DO bring in advertising dollars. Although Google doesn’t release their ranking algorithm, it’s known that cross-linking does get you ranked, so creating “blogs” like this creates more cross linking and eventually gets the money-making blog or site up to the top of search rankings.

ETA: Also see spings.

3

That explains a lot – the fake names and attribution, the canned intros, the very fact that it’s all bot-trawlings. I knew there had to be some nefarious purpose for these blogs but I just didn’t see anything obvious that triggered a eureka moment.

That Wiki link on splogs does have a great link to Taragana for anti-splog/sping WordPress plugins, which I think I will browse and install as needed to take care of those once and for all, so thanks for that. Hopefully I’ll be able to clear them out and have a nice clean blog that I don’t have to police for spings.