Welcome to the sorry world of the splog - a spam blog site which is used to increase search engine rankings of associated sites through back linking, gain revenue through PPC ads or just to capture and channel users to another commercial site, often a gambling or adult page. Even with Google's advanced algorithm, splogs still seem to fool search engines, often appearing high up in the SERPS.
Splogs have managed to rise to power due to the availability of free blog hosts, such as WordPress and Google's Blogger. Using such services, hundreds of spam blogs can be set up quickly and easily and it's an ongoing problem facing the blogosphere. Indeed, WordPress recently deleted over 800,000 splogs and deemed blog spammers "terrorists of Web 2.0". This means that about 30% of Wordpress blog sites were, and probably still are, splogs.
However the overall population of spam blogs could be much, much higher; blog search engine Technorati claims splogs account for 99% of all the content it tracks. The problem was so severe that Technorati had to install more effective measures to limit the number of spam blogs listed in its blog search index.
'Terrorists' may be going a bit far. It's a term most would reserve for serious cyber criminals who steal passwords and hack into bank accounts. Sploggers are more of an annoyance and don't seem to pose any threat to the safety or security of web surfers, but there's little denying that the internet would be a much better place if it were free of splogs.
Indeed, Technorati has acknowledged that splogs are one of the biggest threats to its future. If the blogosphere becomes totally overrun with blog spam, it will seriously affect the credibility and usefulness of the humble blog, because people will have to spend increasing amounts of time sifting through pages of spam in order to find genuine, useful, human-written blogs.
But with thousands of new splogs being created every day, the war on the 'terrorists of web 2.0' may be a long fought battle.
