One of the ways of determining if a blog is actually a splog is by paying attention to the content. A real blog actually makes sense in how it is published. The content matches the links and the title. Splogs do not care about matching or having an actual internal design. The content will not match the links or even the blog’s title or the post title. There are even some posts where the signature or the name in the article doesn’t match the name of the post author.

Another example of how splogs do not “add up” is that the sentences or the thoughts being expressed in the post don’t make sense. You could be reading a post on a popular TV show that will suddenly turn into a description of a porn movie. This will also extend to how paragraphs are composed — usually with each paragraph talking about really unrelated subjects — for example, a post that begins with a tour of India turns into a description of a new drug then becomes a paragraph hawking a new diet. Even how the sentences are constructed is made haphazardly, you’d swear some random guy just began typing all of the English words he knows.

When you see these things happening in a blog you’re reading, stop. You’re just going to waste your time reading a splog.

Lijit is a popular search app that’s used quite extensively by bloggers. Quite a number of bloggers use the service because it helps improve how the WordPress search operates. One additional benefit of Lijit is that it also lets people get content from sites that are included in the blogger’s network, and this includes social network sites and other blogs.

Unfortunately, the benefits of Lijit may be overshadowed by a recent new service that many think is eerily similar to splogs.

The whole idea behind the Lijit service is to pool together bloggers who tackle the same subjects and then amalgamate their content into a single site that is called a “publication”. In exchange for this service, content providers will have their sites linked in the hub site’s blogroll — with the articles getting linked back to the source.

What basically happens is that content networks act more like aggregators with the site even republishing the full content of the site’s rss feeds.

The theory is that, if member sites link to this hub, visitors will explore the network site, find new content to follow and this will increase readership for all of the blogs involved. It is very similar, in that regard, to other networks and traffic-generating schemes that have been tried over the years, usually without success.

However, the question remains, is this service a spam blog and should bloggers consider signing up?

The problem really lies with how spam blogs (or splogs) and scraper blogs are defined. The whole idea of slogs can be quite vague that it is hard to determine if you are being lured into propagating splogs or not.

The key will be in how these sites go about their business. For example, it is encouraging that Lijit still uses best practices in reusing content. When clicking on the headline of a story will bring you to the original story and the comments section also brings you to the original page. All of the permalinks in the site lead back to the original link, which is laudable.

On the other hand, the images used are merely hotlinked to the original source.

What lijit is doing may not be outrightly “spammy” but it borders on it. Having said that, if you think the search tool it offers is indispensable, then do use it. But be aware that the site’s behavior can also have negative consequences so try to temper its use by periodically looking at what Lijit does and if you start feeling uncomfortable with new policies then opt out of the service.