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Sp@m seems to embrace many forms these days. Have you ever heard of “widget sp@m“?
Well, recently I have become a member at MyBlogLog community. I have met new people, discovered some great websites that I did not know about, joined communities, traffic increased, etc. So far so good…
The dispointement however started shortly after I have put the MyBlogLog “recent readers” widget on my blog. Even if the traffic was increasing even more, I saw that I started to have visitors that were spending less than 10 seconds on my blog… so I started to wonder what might have been the cause of that. Looking further at my stats, realized that plenty of exit clicks were pointed towards that widget. So why would people come to my site, stay for less than 10 seconds just to click on somebody’s avatar?
The reason for this is simple. Most of the blog owners (especially ones that don’t receive tons of traffic dailly) are curious to see who visited their website, so almost instinctively they go to their visitors blog as well. The downpart is that this curiosity can be speculated and it can become a cheap method of increasing traffic to your site.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have nothing against it if they actually read my blog, but I suspect that this type of visitors visit one site after another navigating just through that widget.
(I think that everybody can agree with me that a blogger should look for quality traffic that will eventually convert to returning visitors not just spikes that will only result in lower CTR and conversions.)

The irony is that I was actually convinced to join this community because of that widget, and now I removed it because I don’t like this kind of “spammy traffic”. But I still am and I will still be a member of the MBL.
I need to add that after having removed that widget from my blog, I have noticed that the “10 seconds” visits are almost gone, even though the traffic has been basically the same.
It is really a shame, since the idea was original and interesting; another good thing about to be “ruined” by sp@m…

The worst part is that I have absolutely no idea how this kind of sp@mming can be controlled. In fact I am not even 100% sure that it can be called sp@m.
I hope that the guys that are administrating the mbl community will find a way to resolve this, or concentrate on better ways of communication between contacts and members of different communities. At least there, you could have a lot more control over things.

Before publishing this post, I have searched the web to see if I am the only one that thinks this way (in other words, to make sure that I wasn’t paranoid, especially since I knew a lot of well known bloggers which I respect a lot, (like Yaro Starak, for example,) were very happy with it.

Surprisingly or not, there were some other people that have the similar issues with this. Take a look at what Michael Arrington had to say about it.

Again, I really like MyBlogLog, because it is a place where you can make contacts easier, a good start for a beginner to have his blog noticed, and to be honest I even like the idea of seeing my picture on the websites that I visit, but at least for now you won’t see your picture on my blog… really sorry about that.
I would be happy to know what you think about this; is it really important for you to see your picture on other people’s blogs? Did you notice a similar trend with your blog or is it just me?

Technorati Tags: Blogging, MyBlogLog traffic, increase traffic

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