These Blog Scrapers Should Change the Slogan to Just another WordPress splog

Have you ever been accosted in a railway station or at a bus stop by a (is it ok to say?) smelly drunk who follows you around and insists you listen to his drivel? Not pleasant.

That’s the way I feel when I click on the link in WordPress’s admin panel for incoming links and find it is not to an interesting blog post but to a fake, spammy blog or splog, which has no original content and is just a trap for displaying ads. Or worse, when the link shows me that someone has just scraped my whole post and posted it as if it were theirs.

I have to wonder whether the good folk at WordPress have thought about the impression made when these sites have typically, it seems to me, not bothered to edit the default sub-title “Just another WordPress weblog”. Surely it’s bad for the brand.

If they were honest (Ha!) these sploggers would edit the sub-title to read “Just another WordPress splog”. I see that Matt Mullenweg is speaking at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas this coming week, which by the way is good news. Maybe I could get to ask him what he feels about this abuse of the product and brand by these characters? Then again, he probably doesn’t need it :).

Des Walsh

Business coach and digital entrepreneur. With coach training from Coachville.com and its Graduate School of Coaching, and a founding member of the International Association of Coaching, Des has been coaching business owners and entrepreneurs for the past 20 years. Over the same period he has also been actively engaged in promoting the business opportunities of the digital economy. He is a certified Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) coach, and a certified specialist in social media strategy and affiliate marketing.