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"Splogs", the curse of the blogging community

Michael Pollit

Fake blogs are polluting search engines but little can be done to stop the mischief

A Blogger website

London: Is splog the new spam? That's the question being asked by an increasingly irate weblogging community as it grapples with the dodgy sites that are starting to ruin search engine results. And top of the list causing the splog explosion is Google, the search engine giant.

A splog is a spam or fake blog created to achieve a high search engine result. The splogger makes money from advertising placed in the splog — often using Google's AdSense service — or by directing visitors to e-commerce sites. Topics range from cruises and health to porn and gambling. On a cheap-looking splog about gambling, to take one example, AdSense advertisements may link to well-known betting firms. The placing of these advertisements is beyond the firms' control, and end up wasting their impact.

The splog issue has grown quickly and nobody knows how many there are. Tracking service Technorati, which follows 20 million blogs, says up to 8 per cent of the 70,000 blogs created every day are fake. Feedster blocks thousands a day while Splogspot.com publishes a weekly list. The latest shows 41,000, of which 34,000 are on Google's free Blogspot hosting service. Sploggers have created a money-making opportunity by tricking search engines by overusing key words and links. Such chicanery boosts the search ranking of featured pages, and draws in visitors who click on pay-per-click advertisements. Splogs can be built quickly by simple automatic scripts or programmes.

Bloggers say splogs have no value, and frustrated users find splog-infested search results contain little of value. The problem is that, unlike email filtering, they can do nothing to stop it. This is a battle Google is unlikely to win. There are always people who see the Internet as a money-making tool.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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"Splogs", the curse of the blogging community

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