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Technorati tag bombed

As I write this, the power of Web 2.0 culture to disappoint wears heavily on my poor, abused psyche. If you have been in this business long enough, you have probably heard of splogging. Basically, a Splog is a blog but filled with robot-generated tripe masquerading as content.

It looks like Technorati might be suffering from a Tag Bomb (think Google bomb but for tagging). If you were to go to Technorati’s top tags list right this second, you would notice a strange trend. Interspersed among the more common tags like web-20 and wordpress are, “male enhancement,” “penis” and several other variations on the same basic idea. This wouldn’t be too abnormal, when you consider that it is the internet, but all of the links that made these the hours top tags are leading back to the same set of .ro domain names.

Technorati tag bombed

.ro is the top level domain for the country of Romania, and is also a hotbed for spammers. Now that they can’t find a way to link farm their way into a high Technorati ranking, they seem to have found a workaround — just create an enormous amount of low Authority blogs, and write about the same thing at the same time.

Someone must be making a whole lot of money off of this scheme. Hopefully, in the next few hours Technorati’s new Authority system will self correct.

[Just click on the pictures for the higher quality ones]

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