According to Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog, the newest issue of Wired magazine contains some in-depth discussion about splogs and how they present a challenge for search engines and the blogosphere.
Blogs have been spotlighted in the media in recent months. A few weeks ago Technorati indicated that about two new blogs were created each second, that the volume of blog posts doubled since last year, and as of July 31, the blog tracker said that they had tracked their 50 millionth blog.
Blogs have become an undeniably interesting and significant resource for all kinds of content concerning virtually any topic imaginable. But splogs have quickly become the ugly sister to blogs, and are growing into an issue that is impossible to ignore.
Researchers at the University of Maryland found that a staggering 56% of functional English-language blogs are splogs.
Blogger Mitesh Vasa found that Blogger.com hosted in excess of 100,000 sploggers in December of 2005.
These figures just begin to highlight the issues that splogs bring to the table.
There have been relatively successful measures taken to battle splogs. Word or number verification systems, comment and trackback moderation have been implemented in a wide variety of blog platforms, including Blogger.
Technorati has seen success in blocking splogs on its site. The blog-tracking site says that it blocks about 70% of the pints for splogs, and that about 8% of the new blogs it tracks are spam. They are quick to point out that even though splogs show up in their tracking, they usually only remain on the site for less than a day, and usually only for a couple hours.
Despite all the things that publishers and search engines are doing to combat the splog problem, Rubel thinks that much of the burden should rest on advertising networks.
“It seems to me that the splog problem needs to be attacked by not just the publishers and the search engines, but also by the contextual search ad providers who are making it easy for spam bloggers to make money,” said Rubel on his blog.
“Google, Yahoo and others will need to raise the requirements for publishers who want to enroll in these lucrative programs. Publishers should have to prove they are legitimate before they can sign up for AdSense or any other contextual ad service. Perhaps a waiting period similar to the one for handguns is a model.”
This seems like a good idea, but any realization of anything remotely similar to this type of waiting program seems far off, if on the horizon at all.
In the meantime there are a handful of things that regular Web users can do to help battle splogs.
Blog owners can find out if their content is being used on splogs by subscribing to feeds from blog tracking sites such as Technorati, IceRocket, and PubSub and using search terms such as their names, and their site’s name or URL.
If a user happens to come across a splog, they can report it. Blogger allows visitors to its blogs to flag a site that contains questionable content. If the splog does not give users the option to flag it, a user can tell the site’s host about it. Users can also report a splog at Splog Reporter, which tells search engines about splogs it finds. If a splog has AdSense ads on it, the site can be directly reported to Google, who could then close down the account in question.
Some sploggers utilize the comment and trackback sections of blogs to promote their own sites, so bloggers who experience spammy comments and see trackback links leading to questionable sites can choose to not accept any comments or show any trackback links if their blogging platform allows them to.
Of course, after splogs are dealt with, there are the emerging headaches of spim and text-message spam, not to mention the enduring problem of good old e-mail spam.
Sources:
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/08/splogs_threaten.html
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69380,00.html
http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39161264,00.htm
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