Spamming the Blogosphere: the Spread of Splogs - The Nature of the Problem
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So what exactly is splogging, anyway? Wikipedia defines splogs as “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.” In other words, sploggers basically create tons of weblogs and have them host ads and/or include links pointing to the sites they want to promote. They suck up the PageRank from this, and laugh all the way to the bank on the income they get from people clicking ads on the splogs and their website when searchers get directed there from the search engines.
So where do they get the content? In many cases, they simply take it from other blogs. If you have your own online journal, you may be a victim of splogging and never even know it. Wikipedia is also reportedly very popular with the splogging set. And there are sites online that feature “private label articles.” These kinds of articles are purchased under a special type of license that legally allows you to edit and publish the article as your own, right down to putting in your own name as the author. Aside from the lack of original content, one of the big differences between a splog and a regular blog is that the splog often contains the same word or phrase repeated over and over (to score well under that keyword in the search engines) and lots of particular kinds of ads in the sidebar, usually promoting porn, gambling, tobacco, Viagra, or mortgage loan websites.
In late October 2005, Google’s Blogger and BlogSpot hosting service were hit with what one commentator called a “splogsplosion.” It led to clogged RSS readers and many bloggers suffering from overflowing in-boxes. In the aftermath of the activity, Google deleted 13,000 fake blogs. It also installed new software designed to prevent this from happening again.
Who or what caused the flood? Analysts agreed it wasn’t a sweatshop of low-paid laborers being forced to blog. A black hat SEO must have used some kind of software to automate the process. Tim Bray, web technologies director at Sun, seemed both horrified and impressed by the results: “The total numbers (of fake sites) must be mind-boggling…The software that’s generating these things is pretty sophisticated; you might think (the sites) were real at first glance.”
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