Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Another new spam-related acronym: Splog

There's a new variation of spam appearing, called splog. Splogs are blogs created purely to promote a product or website, in other words, spam.

I noticed this the very first time I used Google's relatively new Blog Search. I got hundreds of hits from "blogs" that were nothing more than scraped content published in a blog. This will be a very serious problem for blog application providers, blog publishers and blog search engines. Google's own free Blogger/BlogSpot has become a haven for spammers who use blogs for spamming purposes. Google's Blogger API made it possible for spammers to recently create 13,000 splogs, creating huge problems for blogosphere search engines and users alike.

Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal about splog: 'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google

Here's another recent article from eWEEK: Blog Spammers Take Aim at Google

The other spam-related problem with regard to blogs is the link spam or comment spam; visitors (or bots) leaving spam comments or links on legitimate blogs.

The term is described in more detail at Wikipedia

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