My own foray into blogging started with the Self-Reliant Post. In my particular crash-course process of learning how to blog, I also learned about the things I shouldn't do. So, for those of you that want to blog in support of your sites, here are some things you should avoid doing, either accidentally or on purpose. Or, you can do them anyway, annoy the blogosphere, and get blacklisted.

Splogging

Spam Blogging, also known as splogging, is using your blog solely to generate links pointing back to your site and/or optimize content for ads. To get content, a splogger either machine-generates keyword-rich gibberish or steals content from another blog feed, article, or web site. Then they load it up with links and post it.

Don't do this, really. If you're going to blog and put links back to your site, be original. Answer e-mails from your visitors. Write about your thoughts. Respond to comments. Spin off threads related to the content of your web site or your chosen topic. But don't post a massive quantity of quick-and-dirty garbage text just so you can hang an ad off some optimized content. It will get you blacklisted, and in the case of plagiarism, possibly sued.

Spinging

Spam Pinging, or spinging, is when someone unnecessarily pings to force spidering by a search engine. This is usually machine generated to the tune of hundreds in order to trick a service into believing a blog is fresh all the time. This is extremely abusive, and the services that do ping are taking precautions against it now to insure pinging automation doesn't occur.

To avoid this one, only ping once when your content has changed. It's that simple.

Spam Commenting

Blogs come with comment links underneath their articles for the placement of comments by anyone who visits. Spam Commenting is when someone leaves a comment for the sole purpose of tacking a link onto a blogging page to benefit from its rank. This is rude to say the least, and another thing upon which services are cracking down. You can't even get away with this on the hosted blogs, because their web masters have control over whose comment gets left intact.

If you read a blog and want to comment, show some class and don't spam. If you have a real comment, post it. If you don't, don't just leave a link.

Yes, this is the Net. If something has been invented to legitimately make use of the Net, it's all but certain that someone's found a way to abuse it. This doesn't mean you have to be one of them. Blog abuse will hurt you in the long run, so don't do it.

Other links of interest

If you want to look into the ways to abuse blogging so you can avoid them, Wikipedia can tell you more about splogging, spinging, and spam commenting.