With splogs and all kinds of spammy tactics being employed by unscrupulous people on the internet, the world wide web is getting polluted by these dubious strategies. Because these kinds of tactics are frowned upon, splog makers are making it harder and harder for people to identify splogs. Fortunately, there are still some tell-tale signs that will alert you if the blog that you are reading is actually a splog.
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.
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.
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. Keep Reading »
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.
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 Keep Reading »
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 Keep Reading »
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. Keep Reading »
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? Keep Reading »
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.
Keep Reading »
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. Keep Reading »
