Splogs and plagiarism

For the longest time, the issue of plagiarism was seen as only occurring within the province of the academia. Copying and stealing another person’s work is only a problem in colleges and universities, and of course the occasional seedy journalist. The internet was pure and pristine. No one would dare steal someone’s work and then pass it off as their own. Of course, we all know that the internet is now the primary battleground for plagiarists and the hard-working people who actually write original content. More and more people are seeing plagiarism as a growing problem but, unfortunately, many also think that there’s nothing anyone can do to combat this crime.

But there are actually many things that a person can do to help combat plagiarism. There are many kinds of recourse they can take in order to curb this intellectual theft of original content that is being used for splogs and other dubious endeavors online. The first thing that should be done is to become vigilant. As holders of original content, a person must always be aware about the threat of plagiarism.

mouse overs and splogs

Your mouse is a great tool in immediately finding out if a blog or web site is actually a splog. You have to remember that most splogs are nothing more than link lists. A good way to immediately determine if a blog is actually a splog is by gliding your mouse over any link in the page. If you see a very long code and not the usual links that is quite familiar to anyone who surfs the net then you’ve found a splog. That long code is actually the affiliate clickthrough information.

Of course, sploggers are quite devious in that they also have other ways of going around this easy tell. Some sploggers actually have hidden link information. This means that when you hover over a link in a splog you won’t see the link appearing in the status bar. Of course, when you think about it, a legitimate web site won’t go through the trouble of hiding a link so, ironically enough, it becomes another clue that you are visiting a splog.

Splogs are made for money

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.

Splogs take advantage of feeds

If you see a blog that relies heavily on feeds then you’ve stumbled upon a another splog.

Sploggers (these guys are growing like weeds on the netosphere) will use the most inventive ways in employing feeds to get juicy content from other sites and then pass it off as their own content. they typically use variations of certain tactics to mask their splog and pass it off as benign site.

One tactic sploggers use is to grab feeds from different sites that have content that is similar or related to the splog’s “content”. They then use the excerpts in a manner that is similar to a blockquote — and this will even include links to the original source through the feed. There are those who are more brazen with getting content. These sploggers will lift the whole articles and content from the various related feeds and pass it off as their own. It’s really unfair especially for those whose content has been basically stolen.

Is Lijit turning into a splog?

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.

Nifty Tools Dificult Tools

The clamor to come up with an answer to the rising splog threat has many authors developing ways of securing and monitoring blogs that would be a good indicator of any attempts to hack or modify your posts. One such easy way to monitor your blog is with the DigoWatchWP which closely monitors your blogs on Wordpress and sends you an email if any changes are found, even if the email says there is no change. (more…)

Fair Syndication – On the Right Track?

The advent and rise of the splogs has triggered a debate between bloggers, the online ads industry and the Fair Syndication Consortium that debates the situation whether ad companies should remunerate web sites that use stolen content. The opposing parties has people on both sides raising their own points, on the side of the bloggers content should be guarded and deemed as personal property, on the side of the consortium they say that they are fighting for the said right, getting these splog sites to get their claimed earnings from ads but steering some of the profits down the line to the bloggers who were responsible for the blog posts.
Very much a blurred line exists between the grounds by which they stand, and being sponsored by many big businesses and other major players the consortium is indeed raising a very real fact, splogs are here and there is no sure way to combat them or prevent them from plagiarizing content from other sites, kinda goes to the tune of “If you can;t beat them, Join them!”. The bloggers and several thousand writers are still trying to obtain ways of shutting down these splogging sites but as mentioned, there are ways by which you can indeed profit from these sites but the line is thin and you can end up losing more that you hope to gain. The debate is detailed in the following post from TechCrunch where more details are brought to light.

De-Cloaking Splogs

There are a lot of helpful articles on the internet which makes the scourge known and then gives you help on what to do with splogs and other malware that may be preying on your blog. Spam Blogs are hard o detect for they employ some crafty workings of using the same cloaking technology malware uses. Though they are very distinctly different, they share common features such as stealing others property for ones own gain and spreading to each and every blog it can before it is detected and disabled. Browsing around, the many samples of splogs have been taken offline by their respective (more…)

Hidden Splog Dangers

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 (more…)

Why They Can’t be Stopped

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. (more…)