This Wired magazine article is a pretty fascinating one about spam blogs, or “splogs” which are basically blogs being set up with no actual content, but rather pseudo-content (basically links to other sites and text information scraped from other websites). Search engines are fooled into thinking it’s actual, legit content, because indexing robots can’t read, and likely just have some algorithms seeing if the text has a sufficient amount of different words. The splog includes plenty of advertising so users click on some ads as they journey off the obviously useless splog to something better.

Wherever there’s relaltively easy money to be made, some will try to game the system. I’m sure some enterprising person realized it was far easier for them to write some software that could quickly fill a blog with content custom-designed to attract Google AdSense clicks and a high page rank, than it would be to invest actual day to day effort writing something original. I suppose if money is your primary motivator, this makes perfect sense.

A more cynical angle might be, what is the harm here? People surf, they find a splog, which provides links to actual sites somewhere along the line, they click on a few ads, which come out of the advertiser’s pocket, and they maybe waste 5 seconds of their day. Well, for one, splogs water down the whole idea of blogging and the internet in general. If you do a search on a topic and the first ten sites in Google are splogs, it makes search difficult. Just today, I couldn’t remember the url for Scobleizer (scobleizer.wordpress.com) and thus typed “scobelizer” (slight mispelling) leading to a splog. It’s annoying to realize you’re not getting what you’re looking for. The even scarier idea is that at some point, advertisers may realize they’re being gamed and may start requesting their ads be placed on sites with actual, substantive content.

Just think about how general email is borderline unuseable without a spam filter as the vast majority of emails are destined to the trash bin. The same sad fate may apply to blogs if this trend continues. Will browsers have to come with web site spam filters that block out sploggy websites? Maybe there’s a Firefox extension for this.

 Please subscribe to the Webomatica RSS Feed!

Categories: Blogs, General, Technology :: Tags: :: Trackback URL
Previous Post: Housing Starting to Sink in California
Next Post: Digg Problems
Related Posts: Web 2.0 Hits Cover of Time :: Podcast = Apple? :: How I Got Hooked By The iPod :: Mac Anniversary ::