Blog spamming techniques have got T.L. Pakii Pierce and many fellow bloggers hot under the collar. In some ways me too with a small difference. While I deplore spam be it email, blog or comment, I don’t mind too much people harvesting my RSS feeds and republishing them – even though it has linkbacks to ‘spammish’ directory sites. Ok I know that comment is NOT going to make me popular but to me, it’s still only an excerpt. For human readers, I *hope* the excerpt will be compelling enough to make them actually want to click through to my blog to read the whole article. As for search engines, well… I still get a linkback.

BUT the part of such tactics that make me REALLY mad is this. I came accross a tool which I refuse to mention or link to them here, that ads the ‘no follow’ tag to the RSS it harvests and blogs/displays. That gets me mad. The sales copy read (yes I can still quote it verbatim)

Automatically inserts no follow tag so search engines will not follow the link out and you won’t be ‘bleeding’ pagerank

Shees, c’mon people, I’ve graciously allowed you to use my content without asking me and you can’t even ‘bleed’ a little linkback to me? THOSE are the real blood suckers.

There’s also the other argument. I guess many are upset because these people are making money (in many cases huge Adsense checks while we struggle to get a few Adsense clicks) off of our content. Yes that’s bad, it IS in violation of my Creative Commons License too… but then again, many people make money off my content too e.g. content I submit to be freely re-published like articles.

But then again, since I do have a Creative Commons License on my feeds in a way I hold the upper hand. It gives me grounds – should I decide to pursue it. Anyway, here’s T.L. Pakii Pierce’s Full Blog Commentary – How To Blog For Fun & Profit! :: How Not To Blog