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For the record, it was your writing that convinced me it wasn't spam. That is something I should had probably added to this piece but, then again, most people really don't have that much control over their writing style.
Good idea to not mention the domains, though I doubt there are too many domain prospectors on this site.
This is very helpful information. It can sometimes be difficult to spot the splogs. Your pointers give a useful way to to separate the spam from real blogs.
I create daily news headlines for some of my sites and I am always facing the issue of deciding what is spam and what is not. While creating those brief e-mailings, I will find an article that has a good title and even text that looks like something informative and interesting to my readers. Often, however, upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the text was scraped from some other site or an article in the MSM, of course, with no attribution.
In most cases, I will simply not use a link to that article. Unless the text is really extraordinary, it is just too much work to go hunting all over the Web for the original source of the writing. That's unfortunate, but it's the reality. If I know some content has been scraped or plagiarized from another site, I won't use it. Sometimes, it's a close call, but I tend to err on the side of caution in this area because it bugs me.
One other point that is a huge warning about spam is the absence of any paragraphs or white space in the text. I can't count the number of times I have visited what I thought was a legitimate blog, only to be greated by the default blue-and-white WordPress theme and a column of about 5,000 words of text. As soon as I see that kind of content, I sprint away from that blog (actually, I click the "back" button on my browser as quickly as I can) and go on to the next entry my news aggregator shows me.
When I first started that practice of dropping those blogs like hot potatoes, I was a little worried that I might be discarding some useful content that was just formatted poorly. While that remains a remote possibility, I console myself by remembering that my readers are looking to me to suggest interesting articles to them; they won't appreciate it if I send them to a sites that really appear to be splogs, due to their awful formatting, even if they aren't.
But a great feature of wordpress is tag surfing - sort of like an internal stumbleupon where you can click through a selection of blogs that match your selection of tags. If you come across a spam blog, you simply report it to wordpress.com as spam for a modlook and it gets zapped over the following day. During the height of the splog storm I was doing my part, helping to zap 15 - 20 a day - didn't have time for more.
However, your problem with finding original articles is really indicative of the whole problem. The one suggestion I would make is, if you find an article that is suspect, take a quote from it and do a quick Google search, limit yourself to news results if possible. That's how I track down stories for the Copyright 2.0 Show.
Over all though, I think you have the right idea. You're being careful about it and not intentionally linking to spam sites, that is more than what many do!
Ian: WordPress is definitely not immune to spam but, compared to Blogspot, has a much higher ration of ham to spam. The team there has been much more effective at stopping spam blogs and their policies don't attract as many bad guys.
Thank you for doing your part though with the spam blog wave. It seems to have died down there, I suspect the sploggers are now using dedicated servers they set up. It is a much more reliable system for them.
Thank you again for all that you've done!
But enough of my whining. ;-) Good luck launching your site!
And this will probably be lost to the wind, but is there any chance of you launching OpenID support, Jonathan? Personally, I think it should be built into WordPress by default. (Is it? I'm not super familiar with the application.)
However, your bounce rate isn't that unusual for a blog. Most blogs I know have a very high bounce rate as people come, read the article they want and leave. I don't know what PTs is off the top of my head but I know it is well over 50%. I've taken steps to reduce it but it is the nature of the Web.
RS: Good luck launching your site. However, as I said, don't be too worried about your bounce rate. An extremely high one might be an indication of a larger problem but, let's face it, how many sites do you and I click more than one page on?
Good luck with your new site, definitely send me an email when it goes live as I'm going to want to subscribe.
Anyway, yes, my traffic took a dip for a couple of months, but slowly built back up. It's something to do sooner, not later. If you're going to continue using blogger, it will completely re-create your site for you anyway, so it's pretty much no-muss-no-fuss. So even if you migrate to wordpress or MT, at least folks are with you for that. Feedburner makes the feed move pretty easy as well.
But yes, an excellent point. categories are crucial. You can't have just one (the default) and you can't have eighteen million either. I've seen both and both are clearly spammy in nature...