Blogs - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly?

With the massive popularity of blogs at the moment, there appear to be some distinct categories of blog cropping up. Here are my views on what they are, and I think that virtually any blog fits into one of these categories.

So here the ‘good’ types of blog:

Blogs about blogging

These are blogs that exist to help you blog, with various tips and tricks for you to get more visitors to your site and how to earn revenue from your blog. Daily Blog Tips is a great example of a popular and respected blog for this subject area.

Blogs about something

A funny way to describe it, but this refers to blogs that talk about specific subjects and topics for people with interests in those areas. This could be something like cars, computer programming, saving money, healthy living, or even the iPod Touch!

Blogs just for website reviews

It’s not uncommon for blogs to be set up with the exclusive role of reviewing websites, such as the Website Review Blog. These sites focus on giving the websites backlinks to the site, rather than growing regular readers to the blog.

Here are what I call the ‘bad’ types of blog:

Blogs just for Google Adsense

We’re now getting on to sites that I dislike. Any site that has content for the sole purpose of adverts (a.k.a. Made For Adsense or MFA sites) is usually very low quality, featuring a high volume of duplicated content and saturated with adverts.

These blogs are very rarely read, but structured to entice any visitors to click on the adverts, earning the owner money. Thankfully, the major search engines are making strides to pushing these sites off the search results, and therefore rendering the site worthless. Don’t forget, no visitors to the site means no income for the owner, and thus no point in having the site.

Blogs in blog networks

Its shocking common for hundreds of blogs to be set up that have the same article posted on all of the blogs in a matter of hours. The idea is to get hundreds of backlinks to a site very quickly. However, since the same article is posted on all of the blogs, the duplicated content is penalised by the search engines, and all of the blogs become de-indexed.

For the buyers of blog posts in these networks, its cheap for a reason… it’s a waste of money!

Blogs that steal content

I hate these sites with a passion. There are sites that are stealing content from most of my sites in this way. A snippet of an article you have is extracted (usually from your RSS feed), and then the blog links to your content. However, that blog uses adverts like Google Adsense to make money from the content you wrote, but excusing the fact they’ve stolen content by linking to the article on your site. A nasty loophole.

However, the major search engines are penalising these sites too, so hopefully they will eventually disappear. They are often called and sold as “fully automated blogs”. They steal content using a scheduled job that automatically fetches updated RSS feeds and imports the snippets as posts into the blog. I hate them!