I have to give credit where credit is due. Sometimes even MFA (Made For Adsense) spammers have smart ideas.

I recently received a trackback (requires approval) for my Marketing Blog. A trackback is an automatic comment that is posted to a blog entry when someone else links to that entry.

So my post was about loyalty programs, and how effective they are in the airline industry. Someone has a MFA site called airefaresrockbottom.info which says:

"scottjduffy wrote a fantastic post today on "Loyalty Programs". Here is only a quick extract:" The rest of the post just quotes a line or two from my blog entry. Nothing wrong with that right? Someone thinks I had a fantastic post? Well, he has hundreds and hundreds of identical comments about other people and their blogs. So he's basically written a program to scour Google or Technorati for any new blog posts that mention the word "Airline" and then automatically posts it to his own blog with a rave review.

A word of advice to my new (robot) fan... Why not improve the program a bit to make the rave more randomized? "wrote a fantastic post", "had an interesting post", "posted on his must-read blog"... You can easily come up with 20 or 30 different strings. Have your program pick them at random.

Also, your own site is covered with ads, at the top, at the right side, in the middle. Why don't you reduce the number of ads a bit to make it less obvious it's MFA? Have you tried that? Maybe you'd get more clicks? And maybe even you'd trick people into subscribing to your blog! Wouldn't that be tricky?