Why do people operate splogs? The simple answer is money. Splogs can generate money for its operators without them having to put a lot of hard work on actual content.
Splogs earn money from advertising affiliate programs and other ad-based schemes to generate advertising links. They put in links that will fool you into thinking that these are recommendations to informative articles but are actually ad links — and these people earn from every click.
There are other splogs that earn money from hosting while others are more unscrupulous and earn from every click that an unsuspecting visitor will make on the splog pages.
That’s why you should be vigilant in looking at web sites. You wouldn’t want to be an unwitting contributor of money to these splog owners.
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If you’re a serious blogger you probably have heard about Lijit.
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.
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Splogs are blogs that use your content without permission, posts them onto their sites for profits without even giving you a mention or credit for what they’ve done. They do get away with it and in the process they earn in terms of traffic to their sites thus increasing their profits. Most experts suggest kicking back by adding a simple plugin called RSS Footer that comes from Ytoast.com which allows you to automatically add an extra line of content to your feed that automatically places a footer that say’s “Post From :” with a link to your blog along with your blog’s name. Splogs are simple copy/paste artists who leach traffic from your site to theirs thus getting traffic that should have been yours.
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Social media has become too much a part of our daily lives that we simply cannot stay away from them. Blogging is one of the earliest manifestations of the social internet, like many other internet based innovations have been subjected to attacks than can be compared to junk email, spam and phishing scams. The splog is a blog post that is randomly sent to blogs, flooding your comments with incomprehensible entries that will result in overloading of your hosting service for the benefit of the people who make them. (more…)
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18. September 2009
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