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Hey, I Got the Lead Sentence in a Spammy Scraper Article

September 14, 2011 by Adam Sherk

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:

Example of scraped article spam

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:

Example of links in scraped article spam

I even got rolled into a tweet promoting the article:

Bloglines tweet

Jokes aside, it’s understandable how frustrated publishers and bloggers get with content scraping and article spinning. It really is an epidemic.

Related posts:

  1. Great Example of a Multimedia News Article from ESPN.com
  2. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
  3. Article Highlights: Good for Users, Good for Search Engines
  4. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
  5. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook

Comments

  1. Fran Irwin says

    September 28, 2011 at 7:37 pm

    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!

  2. Adam Sherk says

    September 29, 2011 at 4:24 pm

    Ha ha, yes that is bad Fran!

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About Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is an SEO and PR consultant helping publishers with digital strategy and audience development, including enterprise SEO, public relations and social media marketing.

Adam is VP SEO and Digital Strategy for Define Media Group.

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