Menacing Splogs - How To Fight Them!


by Judy Hunter - Date: 2007-05-21 - Word Count: 484 Share This!

Splogs or rather Spam Blogs are artificially created weblogs which are used to promote or to increase the search engine rankings of affiliated or associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blogs as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. The term Splog first came into being around mid-August 2005, when it was used publicly by Mark Cuban. Splog topics often make very little sense and are so wide-ranging they can be hard to pinpoint. But why do sploggers do it? How do you know if you've been splogged? And what can you do to stop it? Here are a few tips for fighting Splog:

Step 1: Finding out if you're being Splogged - Splogs often lift contents from other real blogs. This helps to increase the PageRank of the Splog and also generate better ad revenues for them. However, this might pretty well cause the PageRank of the original blogs to drop. Moreover, due to association with spam, the original blogs' reputation and goodwill gets hampered.

One good way to find out if a particular blog is being ripped off is by subscribing to news feeds at search engines IceRocket.com and Technorati.com. When search terms like the name of the original blogs, the blogger's name or the blog URL is used, it would show what other blogs say about them and also in the process detect the splogs.

Step 2: Report Splogs - Splogs might just be the 'another little annoying stuff' going on across the internet, but they might have far-reaching results. If most of the search terms are filled with splogs, finding another thing in the blogosphere would never be the same.

Hence, splogs need to be reported to the authorities as soon as they are sighted, for the sake of a clean blogosphere. For a splog hosted in the Blogger.com platform, reporting is quite easy. Clicking the flag button on the top right of the navbar notifies the Blogger.com authorities about the splog. However, in case the splogs are hosted elsewhere, the respective authorities need to be directly informed. Also there are plenty of other sites nowadays, like SplogReporter.com which can be used to report these splogs. Moreover, if the splog has Google ads on it, the site can be reported to Google's AdSense program, and the account could be revoked.

Step 3: Remove Spam Comments and Trackbacks - Sploggers sometime comments on other blogs with a link to the splogs expecting a boost the splog's PageRank. It's always better to have a good comment moderation system, and whenever such comments and Trackbacks are noticed, they should immediately be removed.

Blogger.com and Movable Type 3.2 have already started taking stern steps to prevent splogs. It's time we should identify and join hands to fight these menace called splogs and help blogosphere be a better community.


Related Tags: seo, internet marketing, spam, blog, spam blog, splog

Judy Hunter is a technology and internet freak, an avid blogger and trend analyst who writes for 123Greetings.com and quite a few other websites. She also specializes on relationship management.

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