When I got a Google Alert that my name appeared in an article on NFL jerseys, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. Perhaps a reference to one of my social media super bowl posts?
Nope! Instead it seems I’d been given the honor of being in the first sentence of a spam article that had scraped together a bunch of random content.
I’m not going to link to it but it was on a subdomain of bloglines.co.za.
I guess you have to admire the automated attempt to transition from enterprise social media strategies to buying NFL replica jerseys:
And at least the advertisement was well targeted to me since I’m interested in press release optimization and I’m a fan of PRWeb. 🙂
I also liked the ambitious effort to close the article with some extra links for buying property in Africa:
I even got rolled into a tweet promoting the article:
Jokes aside, it’s understandable how frustrated publishers and bloggers get with content scraping and article spinning. It really is an epidemic.
Fran Irwin says
I’m getting tweets now too that say HEY! @franirwin! I quoted you in an article! Then I go check the link and it’s a scraped tweet as a no-follow link in a machine-written article. Gee, thanks!
Adam Sherk says
Ha ha, yes that is bad Fran!