Say It 5 times Fast: Blogspot Splog Bomb
Posted by Melanie Phung on Thursday, October 20, 2005 at 10:53 am
Big to-do in Blogland this week. Some are saying Google has allowed the criminals to take over the asylum. Seems someone was crafty enough to find a way to automate the creation of thousands of blogs on Blogspot aka Blogger (a free blog creation and hosting site owned by Google). Those blogs then steal content from elsewhere on the web to lure users to the site and then bombard them with Google AdSense ads.
Since the blogs have no real content and are designed just to make money via commission on the ads, they’re called spam blogs (= splogs). The result? Lotsa (more) crap on the Internet.
Not familiar with splogs? I dare you to click the “next” button on the upper right of this page to get sent to a different blog. Odds are that if you do this a couple of times, you’ll find some pretty obvious examples. Unless Google has cleaned up the mess already.
Recourse
Matt Cutts - a V.V.I.P. over at Google - gives this tip on spotting and reporting splogs:
You see a low-quality site that is running AdSense. If you run across a site that you consider spammy and it has AdSense on it, click on the “Ads by Goooooogle” link and click “Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw”. Enter the words spamreport and jagger1 in the comments field.
Updated Oct. 21
Seems like a lot of the spam has been cleared out so it’s not as easy to find. I’m linking to an example so you can see what blog spam might look like.
