Sunday, 24 June 2012

Chores ... and blogspam

I've just spent a deal of Sunday evening doing the weblog equivalent of scraping barnacles off the hull of a boat. The necessary change of address in November 2011 (from segalbooks.blogspot.com to jsbookreader.blogspot.com) meant exporting and reimporting the whole site within Blogger, and the process doesn't preserve internal hyperlinks. Mending them systematically is a chore I've been putting off, but I've just started by repairing all the pages up to December 2008 (along with any images that broke due to the change of hosting). I hope to get the remainder done over the next few days.

Meanwhile, I found something a little nasty. I found that all the defunct internal URLs went to a fake blog segalbooks.blogspot.com. Looking at the owner profile finds that it belongs to a "splogger", who has a portfolio of similar blogs, either empty or with bogus content (some with malware links), that have clearly been created to leech the residual traffic from discontinued blogs previously at those addresses. I've reported the segalbooks.blogspot.com as spam, but I don't know if it's sufficiently overt to come under Blogger's definition of spam; furthermore, the Blogger report system has no mechanism for explaining the precise circumstances.

- Ray

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