Spamming the Blogosphere: the Spread of Splogs
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It's a black hat tactic for scoring high in the SERPs, and it takes the fun out of searching for new and interesting blogs. It's called splogging, and it's proving to be no easy matter to wipe out. Keep reading to learn more, including what can be done about it.
I can only plead the disadvantage of not being a full-time SEO as an excuse for this topic not hitting my radar sooner and harder. It’s been around since at least 2003, according to Wikipedia. The actual slang for it hit the press around August 2005, just in time for a major spike in the phenomenon in late October. I’m talking about splogs, and if you’re an SEO who hasn’t heard of this black hat trick for increasing your standing in the SERPs, you’re probably in the minority.
Normally I wouldn’t care to write about black hat SEO tactics. The thing is, this particular one really gums up the works of search engines, and frustrates users looking for real content. It takes something that many people enjoy—discovering web logs with new and cool information or a fresh point of view—and turns it into an exercise in commercialization and content scraping. It’s not fair to the folks who are looking, and it’s not fair to the folks who write real blogs with good content. And these days there are programs to automate the process.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with commercialization. Some of the websites I enjoy visiting regularly are all about commerce. But it’s wrong to deceive the search engines and web surfers by setting them up to think they’re receiving one kind of content, and it turns out you’re giving them something entirely different. That’s exactly what splogging does, and why it is classified as a black hat SEO tactic. That said, let’s take a closer look at this scourge, why people do it, and what about it, exactly, causes problems. I’ll also discuss some of the ways that people are fighting back, so that splogs (hopefully) won’t end up taking over the Internet.
Next: The Nature of the Problem >>
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