SPAM + BLOG = SPLOG
... = SPAM 2.0!
I recently read an article about a new – new for the least geeks of us, I actually read the article one month ago - web phenomenum that I deem worth to be brought to your attention : the « splog ». What the hell is that? The definition, the good and evil, the causes and effects, and the Nota Bene, all you wanted to know (unconsciously) about SPLOGS...
Splog is to weblogs what spam is to emails. Why spam blogs? What’s the big deal?
I. WHY SPLOGS?
1) Spam filters for emails give headaches to spammers..
As spam filters are more and more efficient, spammers are looking for new targets.
2) Blogs are growing exponentially.
According to the search engine Technorati, there are more than 20 million blogs on the web, and 80,000 created every day. Ooh, I guess we have a new target.
3) Blogs enable spammers to improve the ranking of their website in Google or other search engines.
To illustrate my statement, Joe will be my man. Joe is a SPAMMER. And not the dumbest. (All characters are entirely fictional, blablabla, I don’t take responsibility for any fortuitous connection to CICS geeks or other real persons.) What is Joe’s purpose? To drag you to his website (to advertise, sell you products, to make you give critical information about you, which is called phishing in this case), no matter the cost. What is one of Joe’s best tactics to drag you to his site? To get an excellent ranking in Google’s results (or other major search engines like Yahoo !, MSN, Altavista). For this increases the probability you encounter a link to Joe’s website. How to improve the ranking? Well, first, you have to know that search engines compute the ranking of the results according to the number of links targeting a given website. To keep it simple, the more links are pointing at your website, the better you will be ranked in the results. Of course, this depends on the keyword specified in the request as well. That’s why the links have to be associated with keywords that are relevant to the activity of your website. A rational way to get better ranking is to invite partner websites to link to your websites, usually related to your activity. You can cut a deal by offering to link to their website from yours in exchange. What if your so-called partner has no interest in trading links with you because he’s so big already that it doesn’t need you to grow? (You may have to pay them or pay Google too.)
What if you are Joe the spammer, you use your website for your evil purposes and nobody wants to deal with you?
Well, Joe has the solution. Joe built a tool (program) that generates blogs automatically on platforms like Blogger, Google’s blogging service. This tool can create blogs, register them, insert a content into it. Joe uses this tool to create blogs, full of ranking-friendly keywords and full of links (hypertext, typically) to his website, for free. The ranking-friendly keywords can refer to the activity of Joe’s website. They can also state the names of reputed bloggers. Finally, a new trend consists to use keywords that generate juicy Adsense (Google’s program that integrates advertisement in the webpage dynamically, according to keywords found in the content of the page) advertisement.
II. THE COUNTER-ATTACK
To avoid being overwhelmed with splogs, some search engines stopped indexing weblogs, purely and simply. Google seems to have developed techniques that differentiate more or less splogs from genuine blogs, but did not communicate on the subject. Blogger also provides a “Flag” button that enables any user to denounce abuses on other users’ blogs.
Nevertheless, “flagging a splog” remain relatively as inefficient as captchas to prevent splogs from thriving. Cf. Wikipedia for a good definition of captcha.
Captcha of Dr. Gillette's email address: 
Worse is splogs look more and more similar to genuine “human” blogs, and splog filters tend to put splogs and real blogs in the same bag!
III. THE FACTS
1) Fightsplog - blog specialized in the combat against splogs - listed 2,763 splogs of pornographic nature, created by the same person!
2) According to ZDNet.fr, out of 1.3 million posts or comments on weblogs happening every day, 50,000 of them are spam. Most of them are comments posted automatically by robots (programs).
3) Google indicated last week that his blog hosting service Blogger had been infested by 13,000 splogs.
N. B. (just for fun, I mean, just to add value…) : at the origin, the word « splog » comes from New-Zealand and refers to specific shoes, halfway between clogs and sheepskin slippers.
