Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. A neologism (from Greek neo = "new" + logos = "word" is a word that although devised relatively recently in a specific time period has been A blog (a contraction of the term " Web log " is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary descriptions of A website (alternatively web site or Web site, a back-construction from the Proper noun World Wide Web) is a collection of Web pages The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a Hyperlinked set of documents such as the World Wide Web, Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either inauthentic text or merely stolen (see blog scraping) from other websites. A scraper site is a website that copies all of its content from other websites using Web scraping. An inauthentic text is a computer-generated expository document meant to appear as genuine but which is actually meaningless Blog scraping is the process of scanning through a large number of Blogs usually daily searching for and copying content These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites. In computing a hyperlink is a Reference or Navigation element in a Document to another Section of the same document or to another

There is frequent confusion between the terms "splog" and "spam in blogs". Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of Spamdexing. Splogs are blogs where the articles are fake, and are only created for search engine spamming. To spam in blogs, conversely, is to include random comments on the blogs of innocent bystanders, in which spammers take advantage of a site's ability to allow visitors to post comments that may include links.

This is used often in conjunction with other spamming techniques, including spings. Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages Sping is short for " spam ping " and is related to fraudulent pings from blogs using Trackbacks called trackback spam.

History

The term splog was popularized around mid August 2005 when it was used publicly by Mark Cuban, but appears to have been used a few times before for describing spam blogs going back to at least 2003. Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958 in Pittsburgh). He is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA Basketball team, It developed from multiple linkblogs that were trying to influence search indexes and others trying to Google bomb every word in the dictionary. A linklog is a collection of URLs ( Hyperlinks that the maintainer considers interesting enough to collect

Problems

Splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google's Blogger service. Google Inc is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online Blogger is a Blog publishing system. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003 By one estimate, about one in five blogs are spam blogs[1]. These fake blogs waste valuable disk space and bandwidth as well as pollute search engine results, ruining blog search engines and damaging bloggers community networking (e. g. Blogger's next blog link).

Google's search engine uses PageRank, which is susceptible to link flooding, especially from highly weighted bloggers. A weight function is a mathematical device used when performing a sum integral or average in order to give some elements more of a "weight" than others One splog clearly states: "Google's run by people who can't be bothered to post links on the internet. " Splogs could become a detractor to people using, enjoying and finding value in the blogosphere. Blogosphere is a collective term encompassing all Blogs and their interconnections Splogs sometimes choose a name similar to a popular blog in order to benefit from the occasional incoming link from careless bloggers, who think they are linking to the popular site.

Splog activity can cause problems for legitimate bloggers, if search engines respond to splog by blocking or treating as 'suspicious' all web addresses in a particular domain.

RSS abuse

Full content RSS feeds are actually compounding the splog problem [2]. RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as Blog entries news headlines audio and video – in a standardized RSS makes it easy to copy content from genuine blogs. Splog RSS feeds pollute RSS search engines, and are reproduced and propagated around the Net.

Defense

Several splog reporting services have been created for good willed users to report splog with plans of offering these splog URLs to search engines so that they can be excluded from search results. Splog Reporter was the first service of this kind. Then came SplogSpot which actually maintains a large database of splogs and makes it available to the public via APIs, and A2B which blocks web server IP addresses that splog URLs resolve to. There is Feed Copyrighter plugin (for WordPress) which allows you to automatically add copyright messages to feed, so splogs can be easily spotted and reported by visitors or through Google search. There is also TrustRank, which attempts to automatically find them. TrustRank is a Link analysis technique described in a paper by Stanford University and Yahoo! researchers for semi-automatically separating useful Blogger has implemented a system that can detect splogs and then force them to take a Captcha 'spell this word' test. A CAPTCHA (ˈkæptʃə is a type of challenge-response test used in Computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer Blogger deleted thousands of splogs in September 2005 [3] and even more in December.

On February 24, 2007, Splog Reporter announced on its website that it would no longer be providing a splog reporting service.

See also

• Adversarial information retrieval
• Spam in blogs
• Blog scraping

External links

• Blogger: About Spam Blogs
• SVMs for the Blogosphere: Blog Identification and Splog Detection
• news.com.com: "Tempted by blogs, spam becomes 'splog'"
• The Guardian, 17 November 2005, "Cashing in on fake blogs"
• Examples of splog creation software
• Wired magazine article on splogs
• Pings, Spings, Splogs and the Splogosphere: 2007 Updates