Answers to Everyday Questions : What is a splog ?

A splog is a kind of blog created for the purpose of spreading spam that usually contains unoriginal content. Splogs are very frustrating to people in the blogging community for it can cause clogging to the already crowded internet, and the stealing of content from genuine blogs is a disturbing issue on standard as well as for people who use their blogs as a source of income. 2007 estimates suggested that as many as 25% of the blogs listed on the internet are in fact splogs.

The term splog is the combination of spam and blog. Splogs came out the same time the blogging community was born, thanks to the capability of spam to fill most conceivable niches. Because numbers of companies offer free blogging services, creating a splog is relatively easy and it involves no cash. After establishing the splog, it can help raise a site and optimize search engine rankings using extensive links. It is normal for a spammer to begin hundred of splogs, to make it as if numerous sites are linking a spam site forcing it to ascend in the rankings of a search engine so that people will visit or click on it.

The content in a splog can be in various forms. Most splog starters do scraping or stealing content of other sites and posting it as their own. Most splog gain RSS feeds when they steal contents, as the feeds can be utilized to centrally organize content for faster scraping. Scraping is illegal but hard to detect, mostly when a splogger remove all the links from the original site or changing some of the text. Some bloggers use an application to monitor stolen content for splog reasons.

In some cases, splog content has complete nonsense. Generally, splogs are not meant to be viewed; their aim is to make links to other sites to confuse search engines. Most splogs produce trackbacks trying to get them linked to genuine websites. A visit to splog usually reaveals site which is fairly average and most of the time ugly.