What is Blight - Virtual Blight

What is Virtual Blight

Without a good defense, the blight drowns out content on popular sites, driving down the revenue per visitor.

We are all too familiar with community blight in the physical world: The downward spiral afflicting many of our city and inner suburban neighborhoods. Blight is marked by liquor stores and payday lenders on alternating corners, trash strewn lots and front yards, graffiti-covered buildings, broken sidewalks, broken glass and billboards everywhere you look. Prostitutes, drug dealers and scam artist haunting the shadows.

Domains and web properties afflicted with Virtual Blight are like neighborhoods suffering from urban blight. Billboards go up all over the place advertising payday loans, pornography and offshore pharmaceuticals, street corner hustlers hawk transactions that are suspect and often illegal, kids aren't safe to roam around; and people move out.

Online neighborhoods begin as attractive destinations, but often they turn into vacant, desolate ruins. Hotmail and Geocities are two prime examples of Web neighborhoods that have been impacted by virtual blight, destroying billions of dollars worth of brand equity in the process.

Virtual Blight falls into three broad categories

BOT BLIGHT, marketers and scammers using bots to exploit weaknesses in systems designed of for human beings.
HUMAN BLIGHT, individuals and groups degrading a site for selfish reasons of various kinds.
ENTROPY BLIGHT, abandoned and neglect sites with outdated links that still exist in the index.