Splog Attack on the Blogosphere

By Sid Yadav    October 21st, 2005

I have to admit, when I first heard about "splogs" (spam blogs) in a blog I dare name, I thought to myself "oh, this guy’s just trying to invent the next name which everyone will blog about — doubt it will work. Also doubt this whole splog attack he’s talking about is even slightly true". Of course, I was wrong. It’s a major problem and people including Mark Cuban to Chris Pirillo (one of the first two people to notice this) to…ohh….see for yourself….942 people (or 300 splogs??) have blogged about this.

It’s obviously a major issue and is hitting blog search engines as we speak. Chris Pirillo received a response officially from Google telling him that Google is working on it and should be fixed ASAP. Mark Cuban’s venture IceRocket has blocked all or any new posts coming from blogspot.com at this moment. Of course, Cuban promises all this will be re-enabled once they get their filters together or maybe Google fixes this problem. Heck, Kailash Nadh of Pingoat and BoastMachine has even built a "spam blog search engine" called SplogSpot which searches through only spam blogs it has found and lets you use this data through an API to your benefit.

As you can see, the blogsphere at this moment is just a mess. I would like to thank all those screen-scraping-money-making-no-original-content spammers for this who are probably sitting in their room having a laugh and waiting for their next totally legitimate Adsense check to arrive. Thanks sploggers, you’ve just hurricane’d the blogosphere and made a thousand dollars! As the Lotto slogan goes: how great would it feel?

Most Commented

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    Man, what a well set-up website!
  • I guess most spammers that do stuff like create 100s of splogs on blogger.com and other places dont have time to create original content... One way of identifying such blogs is for genuine bloggers to use tools such as http://www.copyscape.com and report plagiarism to the search engines.... if a large number of people start doing this, it would at least keep all this content scraping in check.....
  • Hmm...yeah, i've noticed they've added captcha in the creation/posting process. Smart of them to do this (although i don't think it's quite the level of what one would expect from PHDs and the very smart people Google has hired) and this should hopefully prevent some or the majority of splog spam coming from blogspot.com.

    As for the name, I do beleive creating a new name for this has added a more feel to this topic. I mean, we all want to know what "splog" means when we first hear it, don't we? Where as "spam coming from blogspot" would just be the everyday usual stuff you hear or read.
  • great post. funny thing is when i was first writing about the things in august, i didnt want to use the word. It sounded wrong to me, but i also didnt want to use spam because i thought people would just dismiss it and not pay attention to it.

    at least the word splog leads people to ask what they are.

    and it seems like google is implementing some new features on blog creation
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