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Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs or Blam!, are weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are a type of scraper site, where content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites. These blogs contain an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites. There is frequent confusion between the terms "splog" and "spam in blogs". Splogs are blogs where the articles are fake, and are only created for spamming. To spam in blogs, on the contrary, is to include random comments on the blogs of innocent bystanders, in which spammers take advantage of a site's ability to allow visitors to post comments that may include links. This is used often in conjunction with other spamming techniques including Sping.
History The term splog was popularized around mid August 2005 when it was used publicly by Mark Cuban, but appears to have been used a few times before for describing spam blogs going back to at least 2003. It developed from multiple linkblogs that were trying to influence search indexes and others trying to Google bomb every word in the dictionary. Problems Splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google's Blogspot service. Some estimate it may be as high as one in five blogs*. These fake blogs waste valuable disk space and bandwidth as well as pollute search engine results, ruining blog search engines and damaging bloggers community networking (e.g. Blogspot's next blog link). Google's search engine uses PageRank, which is very vulnerable to link flooding, especially from highly weighted bloggers. One splog clearly states: "Google's run by people who can be bothered to post links on the internet." Splogs could become a detractor to people using, enjoying and finding value in the blogosphere. Splogs sometimes choose a name similar to a popular blog. That way, they can benefit from the occasional incoming link from careless bloggers, who think they are linking to the popular site. Splog activity can cause problems for legitimate bloggers, if search engines respond to splog by blocking or treating as 'suspicious' all web addresses in a particular domain, (e.g. .info or .net). RSS abuse Full content RSS feeds are actually compounding the splog problem *. RSS makes it easy to steal content from genuine blogs. Splog RSS feeds pollute RSS search engines. Splog RSS feeds are being reproduced and plastered all over the net. Defense Several splog reporting services have been created for good willed users to report splog with plans of offering these splog URLs to search engines so that they can be excluded from search results. Splog Reporter was the first service of this kind. Then came SplogSpot which actually maintains a large database of splogs and makes it available to the public via APIs, and A2B which blocks web server IP addresses that splog URLs resolve to. There is Feed Copyrighter plugin (for WordPress) which allows you to automatically add copyright messages to feed, so splogs can be easily spotted and reported by visitors or through Google search. There is also TrustRank, which attempts to automatically find them. Blogger has implemented a system that can detect splogs and then force them to take a Captcha 'spell this word' test. Blogger deleted thousands of splogs in September 2005 * and even more in December. | ||||||||
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