Attack of the Splogs!

The newest thing in the offensive lineup of spam. Cashing in on the big money of online advertising, people are now setting up fake blogs called ‘splogs’ to lure people to it and earn money. The annoying mechanism that sucks up internet user’s time, bandwidth and even slowing down search engines.

The age of Spam, Spamalanche
This article by The Guardian illustrates the situation properly, clearing stating that splogs have no value content and frustrate users by infesting the search results. Splogs which are often create by automatic scripts or programs are filling blogger, which ironically is owned by the biggest search engine, Google.

"Spam blogs cost Google money both on the hosting and infrastructure side for Blogger as well on the AdSense side with spam prevention," said Jason Goldman, product manager for Blogger.

According to The Guardian, “Yet this is a battle Google will not win. There are always people who see the internet as a money-making tool. Just as spammers rapidly adapt to anti-spam measures, the sploggers are learning fast, too.”

David Kesmodal, a writer for The Wall Street Journal Online explained that splogs earn money by ripping off content from other bloggers and then filling space up with advertisement that have some relevance to the content they rip off. They re laced with popular keywords allow they to show up frequently on searches.

There isn’t much a person could do with the obvious plagiarism of splogs besides getting a lawyer to sue them to oblivion, if they can find the culprit of the splogger which is often impossible as they hide behind proxies. (Stepforth, 2005)

An example of Splog

What can we do?
As splogs threaten to bury the internet, users often find that there is really isn’t much they can do. Best way is to be vocal and demand that those with power and authority to take action (Lee, 2005).

Fighting back require internet users to report splogs when they find it to their host and hopefully the host will delete it (Carton, 2006) However how many people actually use their time to report them to the proper channels so that they can be removed. Furthermore, a single script create 13,000 splogs, let me emphasize on the single script part (Lee, 2005). Users would spend a lot of time to combat splogs while they are being created automatically, it just doesn’t add up.

Splogger software

Money drives the world

Realistically though there isn’t much that we can do about it. As long as people can make profit from doing this, it will be done one way or another. Just like the piracy, it will be a never ending war of technology as both will try to outdo the other. Just the entry on ‘Big Bucks in Blogging’, money will drive people to develop more fake blogs as the market prove more and more lucrative.





References
1. Carton, S, 2006. Fighting the Damage of Splogs. Viewed on 6 June 2007 at http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3595536

2. Kesmodal, D, 2005. 'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google. Viewed on 6 June 2007 at http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB112968552226872712-a60HA16WosKoP_LNbwPAkLZQQJE_20061018.html?mod=public_home_us

3. Lee, N, 2005. How to Fight Those Surging Splogs. Viewed on 6 June 2007 at http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/10/69380

4. Pollit, M, 2005. Cashing in on fake blogs. Viewed on 6 June 2007 at http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,16376,1643774,00.html

5. StepForth SEO News Blog, 2005. Splogs + Scraping + AdSense = Fraud. Viewed on 6 June 2007 at http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2005/10/splogs-scraping-adsense-fraud.php