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Spam blogs

Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, 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. Content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites with 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[1]. 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.

Benefits

They are good at launching new websites, as Google caches blogs frequently. There's rumored to be a secret webring called the 'Google brain' that does ethical splogging to improve the ranking of random good websites.

RSS abuse

Full content RSS feeds are actually compounding the splog problem [2]. 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. As well as automated attempts to find them. Blogger has implemented a system that can detect splogs and then force them to take a Captcha 'spell this word' test. Blogger has recently deleted thousands of splogs in September [3] and even more in December.

External links

• Blogger: About Spam Blogs
• Wired: How to Fight Those Surging Splogs
• SVMs for the Blogosphere: Blog Identification and Splog Detection
• news.com.com: "Tempted by blogs, spam becomes 'splog'"
• A public, searchable database of blog spam pages
• The Guardian, 17 November 2005, "Cashing in on fake blogs"
• Examples of splog creation software

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This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.