Often when I post on my blog, I get a linkback from another blog that has repackaged my posting. While I like other bloggers quoting from my site, many backlink-sites I come across look completely automated. They contain nothing but machine-generated quotes taken from fresh human-generated blog postings that have just appeared on other sites. Presumably these content thieves do it to attract search traffic (i.e. click revenue) and for boosting their own page rank.

However there are even more annoying sites, for example sites like CodeWebLog.com: While researching information for a programming project, Google repeatedly showed me hits on that site that looked promising. When I clicked on the links however I found meaningless garbage, consisting of hashed up partial sentences obviously quoted from technology blogs, but without any link back to the full source. None of the text really made any sense. It was total garbage, but with enough unique keywords to show up in search results and waste people’s time.

I reported these Google spammers to Google’s abuse department and hope they will ban them from their index.