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Hidden Splog Dangers

Jon — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:08:25 +0000

There is an alarming rise in the incidence of splogs becoming a way of spreading malware in the form of phishing or other identity theft scams and people are taking notice. Spam blogs as we know are blogs that are created solely to steer ranking bots to their sites without giving second thought about the many sources they plague. There are also link-farms that do more than just steal content, they automatically fill in links to boost their own sites gaining more attention from indexing bots. Being bots themselves, these nasties prey upon unsuspecting blogs, stealing their content not giving a damn about the hard work that went into making the said posts. Comment and track-back scams are also on the rise which send multiple comments promoting certain products such as drugs and other obviously fake products. They can be used for DoS attacks, flooding hosting servers with comments that if left unattended can swell into the thousands.
Having a blog and getting hundreds of comments is a sure sign you may be falling victim to such activities, spam comments can easily be screened with captcha plugins that seems to be one of the simplest ways of getting rid of spam comments. As with splogs, the link-back technique is still the most effective way to kick them out and one can take action with Google’s AdSense by reporting the said sites and kicking them out of business. There may be no immediate action taken but with our combined effort, we can surely find a way to kick them out and to get our content to our readers who deserve nothing but the best. Bloggers of the world should unite and get these blogs out so we can blog in peace for whatever reason we may see fit.

Why They Can’t be Stopped

Jon — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:36:10 +0000

The scourge of the Splogs and their Splogging creators are truly nagging each and every blogger on the planet yet there is a specific fact that bloggers have pointed out, why there is not much in terms of tools or utilities/plugins that can stop these bots? That is a question we’d have to press and keeping silence is like telling these guys that they can get away with what they’re doing. Spamming plugins like Akismet abound yet there are not much available for controlling the stealing actions of these programs. We’d have to ask the many Wordpress developers out in the wild of the internet that question or maybe they are already doing something about it and are about to do so in the near future. Most bloggers are forced to do the unthinkable, kill their blogs and start anew with the plugins they find that nips the bud before it opens.
But killing a blog isn’t always the best option for established blogs, random blogs and anything in between are being hit again and again. The action would also bolster the ego’s of these darned crooks and fighting back may be the best course of action. Reporting the sploggers to Google is one option with it’s adsense system that ranks blogs and content accordingly. That way, they can kill these bots, shutting them down permanently. The downside, is that like the rest of malware out in the wild, they seem to be adapting as fast as controls are put in place. A simple relocation or use of the millions of IP addresses tends to leave these plugins in the dust catching up when they smell the stink and so on and so forth. More on the scourge of blogs in the coming posts, blog safe and keep safe.

Splog Mechanics

Jon — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:35:12 +0000

We all know of the situation, you work hard researching a blog post and you get it out to the most people possible through the many publishing methods on the web making your content work for you. Then you notice that your very much colorful blog is losing authority and find that your RSS feeds are being tapped by unknown people stealing your content and claiming them as their own getting the exposure you should have been and not even giving you any credit for it. Call it copy/paste, plagiarism and even plagiarism but stealing is stealing yet with the problem out in the open, why hasn’t anybody thought of a way to seek these sites and shut them down? Even the many a brilliant minds out there on the net have admitted again and again that the net is too vast a territory to police and such activities are too random and predictable at the same time that there is no specific way to root them out.
One method employed by established bloggers is to use an AntiLeech plug-in which creates a fake blog post for them to lock onto, at the same time obtaining their IP Addresses and blocking further attempts by these crazy bots from stealing further content. It also works by setting up the fake blogs with a link-back that links back to your site that can be annoying to the splogger. There is a problem though, any content already stolen is not recoverable and as fast as it does it’s work to prevent the act, the bot adapts and changes IP address again getting hold of more of your precious posts. The fake posts look legit enough to trap these splogging bots yet they are reacting seemingly as if preempting such actions. More in the coming posts on how these nuisance programs work and how we can fight back.