Splogging: the never ending blog war

Blog posts are acknowledged as one of the best methods of generating traffic and one of the most inexpensive methods of creating a brand identity. No matter what your intentions are or how limited your budget is, if you can write about your industry in a manner that appeals to an online audience, you can give your business a significant boost. Blog posts are everywhere as each online business seeks to become the next big thing on a shoestring budget.

However, with something as popular as blogging there is always likely to be certain issues to face. Splogging is a scourge that has plagued blogs almost since the blogging phenomenon began. A ‘splog’ is another name for a spam log and they are located all over the Internet. In essence, it is yet another way from scammers to turn something good into a rotten apple, all in the name of profit. No one is safe from it. Back in 2005, Google’s Blogger service was inundated with an estimated 13,000 fake blogs. Splogs are different people’s blogs filled with nonsensical information with the same keywords repeated in a bid to fool the search engines. Thankfully, Google have long since found ways to deal with keyword stuffing, but splogs are not extinct by any means.

How do I know I am a victim?

The original purpose of splogs was to take your content in order to increase the splogs’ PageRank. Then, the sploggers would receive cash from advertising revenue. Hundreds of thousands of splogs are still created daily even though there are more anti-splog programs than ever before. If you find that your blog’s search engine ranking is falling for no apparent reason, you may be a splogging victim. Subscribe to news feeds and you will be updated on mentions of your blog. You will know splogs by the huge amount of keywords used, the fact that they contain garbage content and thousands of posts generated per month.

Google fights back

The majority of splogs can still be found in Blogger.com. Google are hard at work to reduce the number of splogs that are visible and to be fair, they are doing an excellent job. Constant analysis and filtering is taking place and there is also a ‘flag’ button for Blogger users to point out examples of new splogs. It is a constant battle because as you might expect, sploggers have become far cleverer in their attempts as they continue to try and beat the Google system.

For example, there are splogs that have a number of links to legitimate sites and imported content for posts which makes them extremely hard to pin down. When splogs were originally created, they consisted of little more than long rows of keywords and a host of advertising links. Now, a greater effort is being made to make them at least resemble genuine blogs in the eyes of search engine spiders. Fortunately, Google and their Blogger.com site are more advanced than other sites when it comes to dealing with the problem.

But this may be a never-ending war

The software used by sploggers can create thousands of these rogue blogs every single hour. They provide opposition to legitimate blogs in terms of search engine ranking as well as stealing content. It is likely that the new software available to sploggers will strengthen their hand and make them hard to defeat. No matter what search engines and companies selling anti-splogging software do, there are simply too many individuals keen on this method of black-hat advertising. The thing is, Google actually make money from splogs because of the advertising and are required to spend a fortune to combat sploggers as well as losing business.

There is a huge number of anti-splog devices carrying several layers of protection that completely prevent splogs from carrying out successful attacks on blogs. But you can be certain that sploggers will find new and innovative ways of getting past these new road blocks like they have done in the past. There is simply too much cash at stake for them to quit. As things stand, bloggers need to be wary and look out for splogs stealing content. This particular blog war has been going on for many years and there are no signs of it stopping anytime soon.