Today I received a notification that a couple of my posts on Apache Tomcat had been reposted by Sutocom.net. I thought that this is likely spam; the type of “random following” that you get on Twitter, where someone follows you just to “ping” you, so that you look up their profile, and be advertised at.
If it was, it worked – because I checked their site – I wanted to find out who was linking to me.
Blogger Jam?
Sutocom.net seems to be a site consisting totally of reblogged content, taken from whole load of other WordPress.com blogs, and authors. It’s all done “fair” in that it provides references and links to the original blog/author, but this cannot be good for SEO – for them at the very least?
Harmless Spam?
Still, Sutocom.net currently has a domain authority of 32, which is surprising for the unethical way that they source their content (I think anyway). On the face of it, this ought to provide my blog with some decent “link-juice”, however it just feels wrong.
- No original content – Sutocom doesnt produce any original blog articles. Original articles are duplicated on their blog from whatever source they came from.
- Too many posts – They re-blog about 30 articles on a day. Google isn’t stupid – it’s a small site relatively “heavy” on the blog side.
- Duplicate Comments – They post the same comment/link on the original articles “Reblogged this on Sutoprise Avenue, A SutoCom Source“. If it was genuine guest/reblogging, this wouldn’t be identical – and I suspect that Google will realise this.
- Poor Quality – The whole site itself is poorly written, vague, and low quality.
Unethical Scam?
Despite the whole blog consisting entirely of reblogged articles, requiring minimal effort from the site owner, there is a “donate” page, which appeals for contributions:
In order to upheld the quality of the site and maintain I am asking for a voluntary donation to fund improvements to this site and sutocomblogs.com.
(there is no site at sutocomblogs.com – perhaps there wasn’t enough donations?)
Anyway, this all adds up to the feeling that this is a site that I don’t want to be associated with (primarily for SEO reasons to be honest).
What would Matt Cutts do?
I think the Google spam team would see that the common link in this duplicate content issue is Sutocom.net, not the author sites that it copies content from – so it’s probably nothing for me to worry about.
With that, I do think it’s a bit unethical what Sutocom are doing (reblogging content, and asking for donations) so I’ve reported it to WordPress as a spam site – we’ll see what happens.
Phil Munro 