Fake Blogs
I want to start off by admitting I am a statistics freak. I religiously read sports stats and regularly check the website traffic statistics for my site (and all of the sites that I manage).
I especially enjoy referring links — seeing which sites are linking to yours. The nuts and bolts of the internet.
In the past week I’ve noticed several new links from weblogs, For example, www.mikesspot.com, www.jennifersblog.com/, www.a-b-l-o-g.com have all linked me.
At first glance these appear to be just another blog but closer inspection reveals a few interesting things. They are completely generic. There is no personally-identifiable information, no contact info, the posts lack any personality; they are just little news blurbs (no rants, no posts about ‒my cat”, etc.). The links to comments and trackbacks are are dummies. One has a link to a textamerica photo blog, but it appears to be positioned to push a clothing line.
These blogs are fakes.
But I can’t figure out why. A little digging reveals that all three domains (and perhaps there are more) are registered by the same company — a hosting company. My guess is that these are somehow used by this hosting company to funnel traffic, or perhaps to fool search engines. Clearly, they are trying to benefit from the traffic generated by the linked news stories. Maybe its a scheme to show high traffic to potential advertisers. I am not quite sure but I am curious.
The link to this site has appeared in the links column of each of the sites on several occasions, though the list seems to me to be dynamically generated and perhaps even harvested by robots.
Interesting if nothing else.
Update: As quickly as they came, all of those sites and the others that appeared to be similar are now down. Maybe nothing more than a failed experiment.