Splog spotting
I saw some of my work posted into a blog last week (not unusual). Wad Blogger (which is at www dot bloggerology dot com) posted part of a piece about backing up that I’d written for The Independent in April. A bit slow off the mark?
Upon closer investigation, Wad Blogger turned out to be a splog. A blog that’s set up only to contain spam or links to spamvertised sites. There are plenty of them on Google’s blogger service but this was the first one I’d seen that uses WordPress. Let’s hope Google bans this splog soon.
I’ve now worked out how the spammer is posting into his splog. The payback seems to be google ads on a series of linked web sites. By putting links to the spamvertised sites into hundreds of postings on different topics, the spammer sidesteps the no follow attribute that applies to comments. This increases the page rank for the spamvertised sites such as www dot simple-carpet-cleaning dot info which contains three google ads. All this adds nothing to the blogosphere but just underlines the lengths to which spammers will go. Read more information about splogs.
Update (16 September): I’m now beginning to gain an idea of the scale of this problem. If you visit www.weblogs.com you’ll see a list of the latest blogs. A large number in the list are splogs. Google’s new blog search may help you find even more. Here’s a typical one (”spaces.msn.com/members/car-loan-finance”) hosted in MSN Spaces and another (”allergy-help-online.blogspot.com”) hosted in Blogspot. And another (”a2zbusinesscards.info/business”) that uses WordPress…. the list goes on and on and on! (delete the quotes and insert http:// in front of the names to visit)
And here are some links on splogs: Fighting splog, Hunting spamblogs, What is a splog? and how to save the web from splogonoma
19 Sept. Wad Blogger has added 200 posts over the weekend. Each one has a link to a spamvertised site.
