Blog Wars: Attack Of The Splogs
By Priya Shah
The
search engines, namely Google, are striking back at sploggers
and their malevolent creations, the splogs.
According to media
reports, Google has taken measures to impede those attempting
to use its Blogger service to create and maintain fake blogs.
Blogger's
official corporate blog mentioned the "spamalanche"
that has search engines, blog search engines and net advertisers
in a tizzy. They are now working together to eliminate the economic
incentive for splogs by identifying them at their source - by
domain - and not indexing them.
Can CAPTCHA Stop The Spamalanche?
The "CAPTCHA" test is a method by
which automated programs that post or create blogs can be foiled--where
the user is asked to type in a sequence of letters from a line
that people can read, but computers can't decipher.
Blogger is currently working on ways to reduce
false positives and ensure that once a blog with word verification
has been established as legitimate, the blogger will no longer
need to solve the CAPTCHA.
Why Create Splogs In The First Place?
Splogs generally fall into one of two categories,
notes Mediapost:
Link farms, which pack hundreds or even thousands of blogs with
gibberish or recycled content, and contain multiple links to
a particular Web site, which allow them to game Google's PageRank
algorithm, creating artificially high organic search rankings;
and spam blogs that simply recycle content with AdSense or other
advertising on them in the hopes of making money from errant
users clicking on the ads.
Splogs most often get their content by
scraping - the process of sending an electronic copying bot
to take everything it sees, recreating it on an unlimited number
of instant documents, writes Jim
Hedger. Literally millions of instant sites have sprung
up over the past twelve months, most of which are free-hosted
Blogs, containing content scraped out from the original sites.
Why Splogs Are Evil
An article by the Wall
Street Journal notes that the splogs are a big source of
frustration for several search-engine start-ups that focus on
blog searches, such as IceRocket.com LLC, Technorati Inc. and
Feedster Inc.
Jim Hedger makes some excellent points about
why splogs are a menace to genuine bloggers.
- Splogs are content thieves and can cause honest webmasters
to get caught up in technical and financial issues by losing
search engine listings and advertising revenue
- Splogs use up blogging resources, especially those of Blogger
and Blogspot
- Slogs clog up the search results with crappy and irrelevant
sites.
- Splogs devalue the legitimate uses of blogs as communications
and marketing tools
- Splogs might lead future blog readers or users away from
the growing blogosphere.
Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek,
a firm that monitors and searches blog content, said that spam
blogs make it harder to convince companies to blog.
What Can You Do About Splogs?
It’s not just the engines that are fighting
back. There are a few knights in shining armour out there, like
Frank Gruber, a blogger in Chicago who became frustrated while
encountering splogs in search engines, and recently launched
a site called SplogReporter,
reports the Wall Street Journal.
SplogReporter lets anyone submit the Web address
of a suspected splog. Gruber has created an index to rate how
"spammy" a blog is, and is building a database of
splogs that he may share with search engines.
Google engineer, Matt Cutts, provided tips
on how to report spam to Google on his blog. Use his tips
to report spam and do your bit to clean up the blogosphere.
I first wrote
about spam-blogs here, and recommended that instead of using
blogs for spam, marketers must focus on building content-rich
sites and getting high-value links to them.
Don't restrict yourself to just the SEO benefits
of blogging. Appreciate the value that blogs can add to your
marketing and public relations strategy and use them the way
they were meant to be used - as cutting-edge and "cool"
tools for communicating with your target audience.
(CC) Creative Commons License
Priya Shah is CEO of the blog
publishing firm, Connect10. Subscribe to her free Marketing
With Blogs email course. Request the whitepaper Boost
Your Search Engine Visibility With Blogs And RSS here.
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may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact
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