Splog war friendly fire - Google whacks me for the sins of others

I think I now see why the indexing speeds of my kateva.org pages wax and wane...

Gordon's Tech: The hidden curse of spam blogs - collateral damage

I've noticed an unhappy correlation.

Periodically spam blogs (splogs) will start harvesting my posts.

When they do that, email from kateva.org begins to be filtered into Gmail's spam folders, my Google PageRank falls, and the site is indexed less often.

When the splogs move on to another victim, things reverse.

I'm just collateral damage.

Ouch.

What hurts the most, really, is the decreased indexing. I like being able to search my memory collection.

Splogs fraudulently assume a part of my "data signature", so Google assigns a part of their reputation to me. Google knows "me", after all, only by my data.

It's a new form of identity theft, one that biologists would readily understand.

In the end I'm collateral damage; splog wars between Google's and the parasites are damaging my reputation -- and my memory.

Cyberwar is heck.

So, what do I do about it?

Update 8/18/08: Here's one view of the splog effect -- it's a list of splog posts generated in the past few hours from recent Gordon's Tech articles




Google is not yet omniscient. All it knows is that these posts are found here -- and in some very bad neighborhoods. We are the reputation of our data.