BlogPower, RSStoBlog, InstantBlogandPing.com, BlogAutoMachine.com, Blog-and-Ping-Machine.com, and others are tools designed to accomplish one thing and one thing only... to spam the search engines.
Now I do realize that these are tools and any tool can be misused, but I do not believe for an instant that these were developed for any other reason expect to spoof the search engines. Andy Wibbels has a pretty good post on his
Easy Bake Weblogs blog. Brett Fogle, Co-creator of Blog Power, even jumps in to comment on Andy's negative review of the product. Brett trys to use the tool argument "Blog Power is a tool, one that can and should be used responsibly for auto-posting theme related content to your blog." Maybe it was just Armand Morin's demonstration of using the tool tool as an SEO spamming tool that made me think that's what it was. Andy's opinion of Brett's so-called tool reflects that of mine in my
"The Death of Free Blogs" post. Brett claims that "Andy should have at least *used* the software before coming out publicly and at first slandering Armand Morin and dragging his name through the mud. Armand simply realized how powerful it is, and promoted it." I guess I should've bought it to... NAH! I've got better things to spend $197.00 on.
Armand Morin is no dummy. He saw BlogPower for exactly what it was and this is why he jumped in and promoted it. I see it as another way for the gurus to shear the sheep. Now I wonder if the sheep shearers will give their customers their money back. BlogHarbor is the first of the blogging services (and they should be since Armand used them for his demonstration) to ban this type of tool; they know that their future is at risk due to this type of "tool". Brett further stated on Andy's site, "What's wrong with pre-loading a list of relevant RSS feed articles (with permission) and also having the option to add your own related articles that you've written into an article respository, and setting the software to post to your blog at periodic intervals?" Absolutely nothing, but Brett, you didn't build this tool to do that! Most blogging systems (at least Quikonnex does) provide their users with a way to schedule the posting of items. Quikonnex allows for the pre-posting of items and they show up in our publisher's blog pages when they've decided to release them to their subscribers. Why build a program that will ping the weblog lists every minute when sites like weblogs.com only permit pings every 30 minutes. PingOMatic will respond to a quick ping with a "Hold your horses cowboy!" message. Give me a break! Your argument is no different than Napster used when they first started their song piracy network. They provided the tool for piracy and they paid the price. BlogPower and all the similar tools are no different. They're a tool for blog spam, nothing more. If they weren't, then why do the sites promoting them not tout their time saving benefits or teach about the ethical way to use such a tool. Nope, they promote their SEO spoofing ability and the riches for zero effort approach.
Trina Schiller, one of the Quikonnex publishers, has gone out on a limb to call this as she sees it. Her post at Howtocorp.com on
RSS Spam shows how volatile this topic is. I'm surprised at the number of Internet marketers responding to her that thinks this behavior is okay. No, Armand Morin did not create BlogPower, Brett Fogle and Marc Quarles did. However, he did lend his GuruPower to BlogPower to create the buzz. Hmmmm, buzz, isn't that the sound shears make?
These products will sell and be abused (because that's what is taught) by the sheep, the gurus will make the millions and the sheep will make a whopping $8.00 a day off of Google Adsense... Wow! I'm just curious about one thing... why would anyone buy software from a "35 Year-Old Computer 'Dummy'"? And who is the dummy? Marc, Brett, Armand? Or is this their target market?
My apologies Michele. I squeeze in my blogging when I've got time, which lately is limited. Responding to QMTPs ranks #1, email #2 and then comes responding to comments.
The way most of this blog spamming software works (and I'm not referring to the comment spamming) is that it will pull content from RSS feeds and create static webpages from that content. I guess one good thing is that they don't continually refresh themselves as would someone that was syndicating content. To track those using such software, you'd have to follow every referral indicated in the the statistics. I do not see an effective way to stop this abusive behavior. It'd be like trying to stop someone from copying & pasting content from your other websites and using it on their sites without permission. It requires continuous searching and monitoring. When you find misused information, then the recourse is through copywrite violation notices to the website owner.
With comment spamming, blacklists and other methods can be used effectively. With the blog and ping spamming tools there's not much we can do (at this time). I'm thinking that blocking the based upon User Agent may be a technique that might be pursued. The challenge though is determining what User Agent these products use to identify themselves. A legitimate program would identify itself. If any readers have purchased one of these program, I'd certainly like to do some experimentation on this.
rsstoblog.com
They are SCAMMERS. Michelle@rsstoblog.com dont even work. I am going to SUE them. Their support is gay. I have tried everything and tried to contact these people and nothing. Do not buy this Script.