Revenge of the Splog
posted by Daniel Solove
I previously blogged about splogs earlier this week. This recent Wall St. Journal article (one of the rare freebies on the WSJ website) has some more interesting information about splogs:
Just this past weekend, Google’s popular blog-creation tool, Blogger, was targeted in an apparently coordinated effort to create more than 13,000 splogs, the search giant said. The splogs were laced with popular keywords so that they would appear prominently in blog searches, and several bloggers complained online that that the splogs were gumming up searches for legitimate sites. . . .
Many spammers are buying special software on the Web that allows them to automatically create scores of phony blogs in mere seconds. One program cited by splog critics is BlogBurner, which starts at $47 a month. The tool “creates a unique blog for your Web site in less than one minute — even if you know nothing about computers,” according to the BlogBurner.com site.
BlogBurner’s founder, Rick Butts, denies that his software is used by spammers. He says it is used by business owners to automatically create blogs based on content pulled from their Web sites. He acknowledges that the blogs being created by BlogBurner are often used to help draw attention to a company’s main Web site. “I’m not going to pretend to say we’re altruistically creating blogs for humans to read,” he says, adding that other companies have mimicked his software and sold it to spammers.
On the Splog Reporter website I wrote about:
Frank Gruber, a blogger in Chicago who became frustrated while encountering splogs in search engines, recently launched a site called SplogReporter.com. It lets anyone submit the Web address of a suspected splog. SplogReporter has created an index to rate how “spammy” a blog is, and is building a database of splogs. Mr. Gruber, who says he was inspired by Mr. Cuban’s crusade against splogs, has not decided what he will do with the information. But he says he may share it with blog search engines.
October 20, 2005 at 5:39 pm
Posted in: Blogging, Technology
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