Spamming the Blogosphere: the Spread of Splogs - Damming the Flood
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The Blog Mass Index isn’t the only automated splog producer on the market; it’s just the one that happened to hit my radar first. This has been going on for a while. Most people know that Google’s index is about eight billion pages strong; what not everyone knows is that an estimated one third of those pages have been generated by machines. Wikipedia estimates that one in five blogs may in fact be splogs. Back in October 2005, blog search provider Technorati estimated that 5.8 percent of new blogs overall are fake or potentially fake. That’s 50,000 posts. As of November 2005, SplogSpot’s database listed 41,000 splogs. A check of recently updated splogs at SplogSpot showed 500—but keep in mind, that’s only one resource (so it probably didn't catch all of them), and at that the list only covers the ones that have been updated most recently.
These fake blogs use up disk space, pollute search engine results (especially blog search engine results), and damage networking within the blog community. Well-known blogger Chris Pirillo pointed out “What happens when all the search terms become infested with these splogs? It makes it that much harder to find the stuff you really want to look for.” This hurts everyone on the web.
So what is being done to fight splogging? I’ve already mentioned one of the actions that Google took. There are also resources online that hunt down splogs so that blog aggregators don’t list them. SplogSpot (http://www.splogspot.com) is one; this company maintains a database of splogs which it makes available to the public via APIs. Splog Reporter (http://www.splogreporter.com) also maintains a list of splogs. A2B’s (http://www.a2b.cc/) main trick lets you find websites by geographic location, but it also blocks web server IP addresses that splog URLs resolve to.
Most of these resources (including Google’s Blogger) have ways for you to report splog. If the splog has Google ads on it, it can also be reported to Google’s AdSense program. If Google determines that it is splog, the splogger could then lose their AdSense account. In short, the best way to fight splog is to be vocal to those who may be inadvertently hosting it; let them know it’s there, and more than likely they’ll take it down. After all, it’s in everyone’s best interest to help keep the blogosphere—and the search engines—truly relevant.
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