Splogs a Growing Problem
Mark Cuban wrote today about how IceRocket (a search engine Cuban is a part of in some fashion) has blocked adding all new Blogspot blogs from being added to it’s blog index due to splogs. Splogs are “spam blogs” that are set up to do nothing but grab search engine traffic, and sometimes links from trackbacks, with either fake information or simply copied posts/articles from somewhere else. There are then text links or other ads on the splog to attempt to make some profit. They’re a waste of time for the end-user, but someone must be clicking, otherwise they wouldn’t do it, right?
I’ve noticed splogs are growing myself, not necessarily from search engine results, but from a few watchlists I have set up for my websites (mostly hockeyfights.com) through IceRocket, Blogdigger and PubSub. Luckily, IceRocket has an exclude feature, which lets me filter out splogs that are just copying my feed and/or the page the feed links to, but in the end they’re still harmful by turning search results into garbage, misleading end-users and possibly committing fraud depending on the advertising being shown.