studionashvegas | design and social media

Thanks and a hat-tip to jeffr0 for pointing this site out.

WordPress Direct lauched today, and it really makes me sick to my stomach to see someone trying to cash in on “auto-blogging” – basically using blogs as spamming tools to get “content” to the masses.

As Jeff said, there are a few things that make him nervous:

Things I don’t like about the site. It used WordPress in the domain name which is a big ‘no no‘. The sites front page looks like a big, fat, giant, marketing gimmick. The site makes it real easy for common users to republish content that in a normal fashion, would be considered proper blogging etiquette. However, in this case, if the blog is doing it automatically, I think it falls more in line with a splog than a human powered site.

Well said.  WordPress has very specific instructions as to how you can use their name.  If it’s in any way spammy, then they will ceast and decist (WordPress Jedi already fell to this fate).  Somehow, I think that WPD may get that same order (we can only hope)

Worse than that, YOUR content may be harvested by the spam bots and republished, with no profit to you.

So how do you block it?  I signed up for an account to see how their spiders work.  First of all, it’s basically just a backend to the WordPress backend.  You can log into the backend on WP, however, by simply using admin and your password.

Once inside, I got a chance to see what plugins they run:

• AddThis
• AdServe (?)
• All In Once SEO
• Category Posts Widget
• cforms
• Google Sitemaps
• Sale Offer Ads Plugin (?)
• Ultimate Google Analytics
• WordPress Duplicate Content Cure
• WordPress Video Plugin
• WP-SpamFree
• WP-Sticky
• WP Tags to Technorati

So there are two ad plugins running?  Interesting.

Upon further exploration I found the admin to autopost: