MaineBusiness.com

The Splogs Are Coming, The Splogs Are Coming!

It seems like we geeks just keep inventing new words, doesn't it?

Let's start with some definitions:

Blogosphere: The unfortunate name for the world of blogs. The totality of all blogs make up the blogosphere.

Splogs: Spam blogs, generated by "bots" (computer programs) often used to lure visitors to a page on a specific niche to get them to click on Google Ads and make money for the owner...without actually providing any service.

Splogosphere: The more unfortunate, completely unavoidable, moniker for the world of splogs.

Ping: A computer term meaning when one computer says "hello" to another computer to see if it's there and to check its status. In blogging, bloggers ping news aggregators to let them know there's a new post on their blog. Standard operating procedure for any business blogger.

I recently got an email from Lynnelle Bianco of Bold Vision Consulting and fellow blogger here at MaineToday.com with her Making It Happen blog. She passed along an article that stated 56% of pinging blogs are spam, and asked me how this affected the small business blogger.

Great question, Lynnelle!

The problem with splogs is that they negatively impact the signal to noise ration on the Web. Just like how spam has hurt our ability to communicate via email, splogs fill up the search engine results, clog our niches, and reduce the ability for people to communicate on the Web.

What's worse, is splogs often steal content off of other blogs as a way of generating their "own" content. For a while, every day I found a blog that had "scraped" content off of one of my blogs to lure visitors to that site.

Today,  Search Engine Roundtable reports that 75% of Google's Blogspot Blogs Are Spam. Google offers free blogs, which are often used by content-scraping-spammers, to get people to their splogs. Once there, the visitor realizes that the content is barely legible--spammers often scrape just keyword rich phrases, not the entire post--and all that's left to do is to click on a contextual Google ad. And who makes money off of these ads besides the splogger? Say it with me:

Google!

If Google wanted to take this seriously, they'd require blogs to be up for 6 months or so before being able to sell Google Ads. That would make it much more work for sploggers to make money, especially since other people could report them to Google in that time and Google could take down their free blog.

Now, how come Google hasn't thought of this yet?

If you do find a splog out there in your journeys selling Google Ads, it's easy to report them:

1. Click on the words "Ads by Google"
2. Click on the words "Send Google your thoughts on the site or ads you just saw" (near the bottom of the page.)
3. Ignore the beginning of the survey and click on "Also Report a Violation?"
4. Choose "The issues were with the website".
5. Choose "This site violates the Adsense Policies in other ways."
6. Fill out the blog, reporting this as spam.

I know that seems like a lot of work, but it only takes 30 seconds. Plus, it's your duty as a citizen of the blogosphere!

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