Jason Rakowski: Blog Spammer
As fledgling bloggers, what we crave the most is validation from the blogging community. Therefore, I nearly jumped through the roof in joy last week when I received my first ever blog comment:
Good Layout and design. I like your blog. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. .
Jason Rakowski
Cool! Someone likes my blog! Who is this guy? Let’s check out his blog… Not bad. He seems to write a pretty good blog on customer service. He looks a bit like a tool, but this guy seems legit.
But wait a second… Why is Akismet flagging this guy’s comment as spam then? Surely someone who spends all his time writing all those long customer service articles won’t let that hard work go to waste to be labeled as a spam source, would they?
Well, apparently they would. As it turns out, Jason Rakowski is not even a real person. As John Cow points out, this is an elaborate spam network perpetrated by some dude named Brian Fleming. Jason Rakowski is just one of many made-believe bloggers created by him for the purpose of spamming blogs for monetary gain. And the blogs he creates (like Jason Rakowski’s customer service blog) are so believable that unfortunately it has fooled many bloggers, even some smart folks.
What about the blog articles? How does someone have the time to write all those believable articles? Well, actually he doesn’t have to write any articles at all. Just do a Google search on article directory and you can see the tons of services offering readily-written articles of questionable quality which can be used to populate your otherwise content-less blog. Some are free, and some are paid services. This is a cottage industry that sprung up around the never-ending quest for content, especially for publishers who don’t (or more likely – can’t) write.
Check out this article by Jason Rakowski. Compare that to an article I found on an article directory by a Danny Thompson. They are identical. Word for word.
Folks, that’s how easy things have gotten on the Internet. You can basically start your own online publishing empire with a) no authors, b) no content, c) no creativity, d) no effort, and e) very little money.
Speaking for the rest of the bloggers who actually spend hours to write their own content – Do us a favor and give us some validation, will ya? Don’t be shy and drop us a comment!
