Did you ever write a thoughtful, heartfelt post and as soon as you posted it, got a comment right away? You click on the comment to see what the reader’s reaction is to your sharing, only to read this:
Thanks for your thoughts. We learn so much on Active Rain. Best wishes.
Huh? Did they even read what you wrote? Probably not. These are point pigs, only interested in their 10 comments per day.
What about this: You click on your blog subscriptions, and see in the new blog feed 3 new posts from the same guy. Curious about this prodigious content machine, you click on his blog. Whoa! 200 posts in January so far! 275 posts in December! But on closer look, this clown is actually cycling the same 6 spammy, self promotional posts every day. The search engine simpleton thinks that if he vomits a tidal wave of duplicate content that he will fool Google. Good luck with that one.
Another variation of the Google gaming freak is the reblog guy. This is a another 10 post a day content machine who hasn’t posted an original thought since the Cold War. He’s not using the reblog to pass along good thoughts; he’s de facto scraping others’ content so his blog will have lots of material he’s too lazy to write or research. Reblog guy also plagiarizes from sources outside of Active Rain, passing the content off as his own.
But by far the biggest laugh is one I was made hip to earlier this week. Almost 300 January posts, all “Members Only.” He claimed Google was already indexing him because he found himself in Google searches. I guess this gnu doesn’t realize that if he’d log out of Active Rain that the search results would disappear. This is significant, as consumers are not logged in to Active Rain.
Rain Camp, common sense and good faith all tell us that a good blog is original, fosters an interested readership, and does not engage in black hat search engine optimization (which, by the way is contrary to terms of service). You can make your blog any way you want, but I would ask what part of “community” you do not understand.