Splogging

This question has been haunting the blogging community as it is designed to ruin the search engine results. In this, search engine Google is most hit. Recently, the search gaint Blogger, a free blog service, was hit by ‘spamalanche’, which made the company dismantle 13000 spam-filled blogs, created in the course of a single weekend. According to Sun Microsofts web technologies director, this is an emergency situation. He termed this as “splogsplosion”.

Splog is a spam or a fake blog created to achieve a high search engine results. The splogger make money from the advertisements placed on splogs. When searchers click on what they think is a relevant site, they end up on bogus blogs full of gibberish and links to advertisements. Advertisers pay the spammers every time someone clicks on one of those links. ‘Splogs’ and ‘link spam’ are often used synonymously. While splogs are blogs where the content of the log is spam, ‘link spam’ refers to only spam in the comments of a blog article. Link spam takes advantage of a site’s ability to post links.

These phony blogs are particularly a problem for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, because each offers not only search engine focused on providing the most relevant results for users, but also a service to let bloggers create blogs. Splogs are also a big problem for several search-engine start-ups that focus on blog searches, such as Technorati Inc., which temporarily stopped indexing blogspot sites. Splogs can be built quickly by simply automatic scripts or programs and sploggers are making most of this money by tricking search engines by overusing key words and links. Such things boost the search ranking of the featured pages and get more visitors, who can click on ads.

Many such spammers are even buying special software on the web that allows them to automatically create scores of phony blogs in mere seconds. One such program is BlogBurner, which starts at $ 47 a month. It allows you to create a unique blog for your website in less than one minute, even if know nothing about computers. 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. According the latest report 8% of blogs which are made everyday are splogs.