Abigail Brady

Suppose a person wants to increase the pagerank of a given site, so that it appears higher in the search results for particular terms. The pagerank of the site will increase if lots of sites link to it. Of course, one way of doing that is to make the site good, so that people will want to link to it, but another and more evil way is to make a lot of pretend sites yourself, and make them link to it. Some people do this by making blogs containing nonsense and links to their sites; some are more sophisticated (the Co$ has a huge operation just maintaining lots of sites which link to one another). Google tries to weed out the blogs which are just created to increase another site's pagerank, but it's harder for them to do so if the blog looks real, especially if it's a program rather than a person doing the weeding. So one way for the lowlife who do this to get rank is to copy all the public text out of someone else's blog.