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Yeah it is easy . . . for a “fake blogger.”(Photo credit: digitalrob70)
Has this happened to you? A dozen or so of my posts were recently (in the last month or so) reblogged by different bloggers. I though, “How nice. Someone liked what I wrote enough to put it on their blog.”
As the conscientious and polite blogger that I am, I promptly went over to thank my fellow blogger.
What did I find when I traveled over to their blogs? A shell. Nothing but a handful of reblogged posts, no comments, or “About” page. The first few times I didn’t think much of it. I figured it was someone starting out and they weren’t sure how to go about it and thought, “Here’s an idea . . . I’ll use other people’s stuff til I get the hang of this world-o-blogging.” After the next few times I was suspicious. Then I figured there is a room filled with “fake bloggers” trying to take over the world, one blog repost at a time.
It happened again today.
Several bloggers reblogged some of my posts, so I know what a real-reblog looks like.
I’ll ask again. Has this happened to you? Is this a new version of spam designed to play evil tricks on the ego of we bloggers? My “real” spam has slowed to a trickle.
Robin Coyle 
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Dang. My ego just shrunk a couple of sizes.
I’ve had a couple, but have disallowed the action. My view is that copying may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s copying none-the-less – and since it’s not my dress-sense or my choice in shoes they’re copying i’m not happy with reblogging unless it is for a very specific reason – like spreading the word about the Free Rice Game, or an initiative of that type.
You jinxed me! It’s happened twice since I read this post.
Interesting that you’ve pointed this out – thank you. I’ve had 2 instances, and didn’t joint the dots that the sites are made up of re-blogs… I will monitor this now. Wondering what their motivation is though… like to think it’s innocent 🙂
I’ve had this quite a bit the past few weeks. I found most are the “shells” you describe. Your first thought is cool… then aww :(.
This “reblog” thing has been happening to me the past 6 months or so – it’s irritating as most of the sites are commercial/spam or odd – most with no bio, little or no past history – and no original posts (often only 1 or two borrowed posts). Something’s developing with these sites.
The first one I noticed was someone compiling 1001blogs…by reblogging tons of others’ works, their blog got pretty good stats as the original authors went to check it out. Not really blogging – a stat game.
Reblogging is getting to be a pain – would like WP to once again eliminate the easy reblog.
Yeah we were reblogged twice like this Robin, it went straight into our spam folder though. I hovered the mouse over the web addresses and it showed a little image of the destination page. One was trying to sell us cheap holidays and the other was cash for gold! Definitely seems to be a new spammer trick (and I got all excited too for a minute when I thought we’d been reblogged and our spam filter had been to harsh, but no!) 😀
I have one of the re-blog sites re-blog me twice – I also wondered, what’s the point?
Nope not happened to me. I’m not as good as you so they probably won’t bother with me 🙂
I think some people are just out to make money. I don’t like ads so don’t operate google adsense but if you had no material of your own and reblogged others’ blogs having subscribed to recieve money per ad generated by your blog posts you might probably make a tidy sum from other people’s blogs. I don’t think the system checks so rigorously for matters like this. I don’t know much about technology but money is usually the goal nowardays.
Your real spam actually has not slowed to a trickle. Rather, Askimet updates their spam algorithms regularly, and if you report the same people as spammers on a regular basis, those people eventually get added to the Askimet database and automaticallly get deleted. So the only spam you ever see are the real new ones. Sometimes you’ll notice the same name, like “lista de emails,” but the URL is slightly different because their old URL is now on the banned list.
I really dislike those reblog blogs. I’ve put them on my Excel check once-a-month list but no more than that unless they happen to actually start blogging.
I’ve not been spammed, lucky me, but this is what this sounds like. Hmm. This is definitely a new approach–feels slimey. Life was still interesting without this new onslaught–will this never stop?…
Today Cheryl1980 liked one of my posts. Since she was a new name, I clicked to see what her blog was like. It was not a blog, but a tutorial on how to get more traffic to your blog… so its a computer generated “like” button that leads you to her business… Personally I do not LIKE it at all.
I had the same thing. Very weird indeed.
It’s happened to me a few times the last couple of weeks. Hope they’re not scams.
Yes, this has happened to me too. I check every reblog, pingback and trackback I get; most are legit but some are not. I wonder: why waste the time on a blog if all you’re going to do is reblog someone else’s work? Weird.
That’s happened to me once..I went over to thank the blogger for the reblog and the name of the blog was just a random allocation of letters and numbers..
I think they are spam profiles..
I’ve not had the pleasure of a reblog so didn’t know this type of thing happened. It sounds dodgy and pointless.
Oh no! 😦
I’ve been reblog get a few times, but, thankfully, they’ve all seemed ok….so far!
Xx
People just want to be associated with cool bloggers. That’s why I’m here!
Hmmm. That sounds weird, Robin. Wonder what is going on… I’ll try follow back on this thread to see who has ideas about its origins, etc. I’m clueless.
Just once, I think. Gutted.
Hasn’t happened to me but I’ve been off for several months. People don’t seem to have enough to occupy their time so they sit around thinking of ways to waste others. I change my password every week on my email account and still I am flooded with spam. Annoying.
Wait until you get those liker’s that take you to a pharmaceutical sites, or a chinese supplier site, when you click on their pictures…
I don’t think it’s happened to me but then I wouldn’t even know!!!
I’ve had this. I’m not too fussed as I found out about it through Google Alerts. As long as the re-posting site doesn’t get listed as a link farm, it should mean slightly higher Googel-Kudos for me.
I haven’t had that happen to me, but I assume as someone else suggested they probably have advertising on their site and just want to draw people to their site in a quick and easy way. Maybe they find posts that use popular search terms and reblog them, I don’t know! I wonder if there’s any potential harm to those being reblogged by these people.
Yes, I’ve had a few of those. Not really sure what they hope to gain though? The last one, there din’t even seem to be a solid blog attached. Very mysterious.
I have had that happen a few months back. I think I left it to see what happened and then forgot about it. It does seem very spam like though on some of these. I think they may be trying reposts so that people may find it and click on their advertising, which they may get income from.
Three or four of these have come my way ~ I find them first quite unnerving and then irritating ~ intrigued by the Zemanta link explanation and thanks for it, however, Zemanta is a useful tool in positive ways, I find …
I’m not sure anyone has yet found anything to suggest what these fake blogs might be other than some new form of spam … don’t get why they waste their time and ours …
Robin,
You’re so popular, even ghosts love you!
🙂
I had it happen a few times last week. Stinkers
This has not happened to me, but I will keep a lookout for it. Thanks for the warning.
I haven’t caught it in a while, but it happened to me 3 years ago on an early post about Hello Kitty and the Virgin Mary. Never did get a response out of the guy (he did have an about page) but the whole blog was gone a few months later.
I’ve had twice where I’ve been reblogged on a site that was nothing but reblogs. Didn’t think much about it until I saw this post of yours. Wonder what’s up?
Very few of my posts have ever been deemed reblog-worthy. 😉 I haven’t run into this yet. But it does seem a bit fishy. Honestly, I think reblogging gets overused by real bloggers. So if this is a new spamming mechanism, it’s even worse.
I don’t think this has happened to me. What a bummer. I’ll keep an eye out though.
I have had several of these and wondered what they heck they were up to. I just don’t get it. It seems like a lot of work just to spam. It kind of scares me.
This also happened to me recently so I’m not sure what’s going on. I just thought people who didn’t know what to blog were just reblogging other posts. I really hope there’s nothing innocuous in it 😦 But it does seem strange…
That has only happened to me a couple of times. I was reblogged by an Asian life insurance blog, which I thought was really weird, so I went to the blog, and my real recipe for Chicken Parmesan–which is quite good by the way, Robin, you should try it, is there. For reals! in their section on chicken recipes. It still brings me a few hits. The only other re-blogs I’ve had were what turned out to be Amway shell blogs. I don’t even understand why anyone would do this. Are you on Twitter? The first day I joined, I had a handful of followers that I didn’t know, and thought they found me through my blog. Nope, icky porn. Blecch. Cheeky Diva doesn’t want to be associated with anything like that. I am totally a PG-13 blog.
I have had one and a couple of pingback as a recent article despite the fact the person is not someone who follows me or has liked or commented on the post they used it as a pingback on but if it sends extra people our way then its not too bad I guess
The pingbacks are likely coming from bloggers who have activated WordPress’s “Zemanta” option. It’s a tool that helps you tag your posts and find related content that can be shared. When you see “related articles” at the end of a post, the blogger is almost certainly using Zemanta.
Ahh thanks for explaining that one for me hitting publish is as technical as I get most days
Me, too. 🙂 I’ve just started playing with the Zemanta feature.
Oh, when I’ve seen the ‘Related Articles’ thing at the bottom of someone’s post, I thought they had gone to all the trouble themselves of finding related articles, I kept thinking they were doing very thorough research for each piece they wrote doh!
Some people do their own research and list those articles they have found as reference.
Always wonder who/how the auto-related articles are selected – and if there’s some commercial/stat thing those articles/sites benefit from.
Sounds like a time saver anyway
Oh JM, really? I wonder how they do it because I wade through my old posts, copying and pasting to make a little list of related articles – but mostly i can’t be bothered, it takes so long to do. 😦
I’ve always done my own links to my own related posts, but I decided to give Zemanta a try. It offers some good tagging options, but often the media it suggests have nothing to do with my posts. My “poetic archaeologist” Meghan Bode brings links to apparent celebrities with the name Meghan, for example.
Still, some of the articles and blog posts it suggests as related content are good. And I will include some of those from time to time. I guess like every tool, you need to give some thought to its use before you dive in. 🙂
I’m going to have to figure out how to do this ‘related articles’ thing if only because I like a good index and i’m beginning to forget where/whether I/I’ve posted things … 🙂
Zemanta is good at suggesting your own posts, which really helps. 🙂
I’m going to learn about it right now JM – thanks!