BlogCharm friend function has issues

Tonight while searching through the BlogCharm referral stats (see bottom of the home page and click on the counter, they are open to the public), I saw one of our first Google referral links.

Unfortunately the top most link wasn’t to the original blog post on VTOR, it was to one of our group member’s friends page. I didn’t realize these friend pages took the entire contents of another blog verbatim. This could lead to major spam/splog issues at BlogCharm as there is nothing stopping anybody from adding you as a friend and thus adding every blog post you make on your blog on their friends aggregator too. It would be one thing if the friends was only a snippet of the actual post or private to the friend, but when it’s open to the bots with full text this will lead to exactly what happened at Google.

PROBLEM:
The blogcharm.com/blogname/friends link shows the entire copy of somebody else’s blog posts and makes it public.

This might be cool if you would make this a private function and restrict access to search engines, but you aren’t so it means that anybody can add another user to their friends list and take all their posts word for word on their blog. Search engines do not like duplicate content. This is going to lead to major splog problems for blogcharm if this isn’t changed.

Example Google Search

Notice that my friend Lestat’s blog is listed more prominently in Google via his friend link in Google then the original content was from VTOR and every post is word for word.

SUGGESTED SOLUTION:
1. Add a robots.txt to any blogcharm.com/blogname/friends area so the robots don’t follow.
2. Only allow access to the blogcharm.com/blogname/friends to the person who added the friends and nobody else, especially SE spiders.

That was the content of the support ticket I just filled out for BlogCharm. Hopefully they will look into this issue and resolve.