What’s splog?
Splog is a term for spam blogs. A spam blog is different from a blog that is being filled with spam comments. Splogs are usually set up by the spammers to attract search engines’ crawlers and to generate ad revenues from ad networks like Adsense, Adbrite, and others. Many splogs contain unoriginal contents that were scraped from other websites, and then the spammers insert huge amount of web links into splogs to attract search engines’ crawlers. Setting up splogs are easy for spammers since everything is automatic. Spammers use spam bots to scrape websites’ contents, change the contents, repost onto free web blog hosting services.
Web links inside a splog often take visitors to irrelevant websites. Search engines’ crawlers will crawl these web links inside splogs without knowing that splogs have little legitimate contents. Advertisements from ad networks are serving within splogs to generate ad revenues. Web links inside splogs lead visitors to websites that have other irrelevant promotional materials to generate even more ad revenues. Whenever a visitor visits a splog and clicks on an advertisement message, a splog generates some ad revenue.
Some free blog hosting services experience high number of splog registrations. Therefore it’s a headache for free blog hosting services to have to deal with splogs. There is no particular easy way to deal with splogs as each spammer sets up splogs differently. There are some common traits that most splogs have such as no comment, irrelevant contents, way too many web links, tons of advertisements, and no information about the blog owners. Even though we know these are the common traits of splogs, these common traits are also present in valid blogs. Some blog owners may turn off their blogs’ commenting feature, have poorly written contents that seem to be irrelevant, contain way too many web links to other online sources, posting way too many advertisements, and may provide very little or no information about the blog authors. Search engines and free web hosting services find it’s hard to get rid splogs, and there is a high possibility of get rid a valid blog. Identify each splog case by case is easy, but free web hosting services may have up to hundred millions of blogs for validation, therefore identifying a huge amount of splogs at one time won’t be an easy task. Automating the process of identifying splogs may lead to wrong validation by identifying valid blogs as splogs.
While we’re speaking, the web is being filled with millions of splogs, and the spammers are happy with their ad revenues. See if you can catch a splog in ten seconds when surfing the web! Have fun in identifying a splog, report it to the proper authority if you like, and remember not to click on the splog’s advertisements unless you want to make the splog’s owner a little richer.
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