Most measurements of web site performance are a sham in some way. Ultimately, non-reciprocal links back to your site improve your ranking in most cases, even if they’re from auto-generated blogs that don’t copy your full content.

I like your site. I’m going to have to dig into it further when I have a little more time. I’m a big fan of early punk, particularly Johnny Thunders and Tom Verlaine.

So far as traffic goes these sites, at best, provide indirect traffic by giving your site more authority in Google’s eyes and thus increasing your placement in search results and your PageRank. The trick is how quickly the splog gets indexed as Forrest pointed out. Most won’t ever place well in search themselves though.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you view it, most sploggers are amateurs who’ve bought a “get rich quick” eBook and aren’t all that creative or savvy about what they’re doing.

Indexing of deep blog links is tricky, particularly for a splog that may get banned for being too aggressive. You can separate the amateur sploggers from the pros on how well they do this. If you want to get deep into this topic, see this post on Blue Hat SEO: 100’s Of Links/Hour Automated - Introduction To Black Hole SEO. It’s complex, but an interesting, read.

Thoughts to share:
1–They don’t use MY name. They write “so and so wrote an interesting blog about this topic” and then they quote a few lines from my blog, with a link back to my blog.

2–I haven’t seen any increase in meaningful traffic due to it. People search for me because they love early punk rock photos. They usually write to me, just to say hi or buy/license my photos. Most everyone either finds me via Google or looks up my name under photos on books. So if this is helping traffic I want/need, I haven’t seen it yet.

3–That’s my concern, that if they find these sites first, will they be turned off and leave? I deliberately posted my classic rock shots on the top of every page, cos I know peeps will leave if they don’t see pix. They have to scroll down amongst all kinds of posts to find me on these sites. I think/hope most are determined enough to find me to go back to Google, scroll down til they find my domain with my name. Or they might bypass these sites and scroll serps til they find my official site.

4–Their contact info is never active, if they even have contact info. If they have a form like this, it always bounces back.

5–If Askimet doesn’t catch them, I add them to AntiLeech using either their IP or sometimes that’s hidden, so I add their website url.

This is a puzzling issue to me, plus the downside is I just don’t have time to deal with it. I don’t have enough time to recode my pages from pure html to Wordpress!

PS I found you via bloggingzoom.com and I’m glad I did!

But I liked reading your first point, that it validates your publicity efforts to see the sploggers jump on your coat tails…

I think Technorati weeds them out to some extent although some who I’ve gotten spam trackbacks from are still listed. I would guess they eliminate ones that are obvious vs. the more clever ones.

The kind that’s likely to get banned are those that show up one day with 1000’s posts all saying “Here’s a Quick Excerpt”. Ones that vary the intro and closing text and build gradually, about 20 or so posts a day, seem to stick around.

It’s really a win/win situation since it gives you free backlinks and the splogger can create legit, if mostly useless, content. It’s certainly a lot better than an out and out content thief.