Splogs.

"Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other." ~ Carrie P. Snow

What is a 'Splog'? Quite simply it's a blog designed to host spam.

"Splogs (also known as Blam)...are weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are a type of scraper site, where content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites. These blogs contain an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites."

- Wikipedia

I've come across a few splogs before while searching for legitimate sites. Like most people it took only a few seconds to realize that the site wasn't legit, and I moved on...albeit a bit miffed about being coned to a site containing spam. It wasn't until last week that I found out just how much of a problem these sites are. A recent article "Spam + Blogs = Trouble" printed in the Sept. 2006 'Wired' magazine had the following to say:

"Just as the proliferation of email spam constantly threatens to inundate email providers, the explosion of blog spam is a besetting problem for the blog industry. Like most people who poke around the blogosphere, I had occasionally encountered splogs before."

- Wired (Sept. 2006)

For an example of a splog click here....but don't click on any of the links or articles. I found this splog by using the 'Next Blog' feature on the Blogger bar at the top of the blog. If you notice sploggers like this one are smart enough to remove the 'flag' button.

A lot of splogs use fake web addresses that automatically forward to another site. Point in case:
http://45cc556g5f.blogspot.com
http://ftr3fd435f34.blogspot.com
http://sdfc5cet534c.blogspot.com

all forward to: http://www.searchadv.com/search.php

If the above links don't work anymore it could be that they have been caught and shutdown....but odds are you can find them back at it under new account names.

Splogers are a bit akin to hackers -- they always seem to be one step ahead of the protection (or counter protection) measures released by programmers, in this case represented by organizations such as Google, Technorati and Blogger....just to name a few.






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Overall the article was very informative and well worth reading. If you haven't read 'Wired' before I suggest picking up a copy at your local newsstand -- after reading the September issue I plan on subscribing.