Give me a break!
This should be upsetting to anyone who has a real blog!
In the past, I have not spent a lot of time looking at other blogs. Blogging, for me, has been a way to publish valuable content on line on a regular basis. For example, Chronicles of the American Civil War currently has 3,972 posts, most of them in 2005. That’s somewhere between 5 and 10 posts every day for over a year. Granted, the posts to Chronicles are mostly articles and other materials that were written during the civil war, but it’s been a lot of effort to process, edit, and then post all of them to the blog.
Besides Chronicles , I have 3 other blogs where, like this one, I generally publish material of some kind each day.
This blog, North Farnham Freeholder, has been established for quite some time, but for a long time it lanquished with no content while I worked at other things like Chronicles . In the last few weeks, I’ve been resurrecting it and trying to make sure that I was able to find some little bit to publish each day. (I ended up deleting the datbase completely and starting fresh, but that’s another story.) Unlike the others, which have specific focuses for their content, my intent with this one is for it to be a “little bit of this… and a little bit of that,” just whatever I happen to stumble across and/or decide to add or comment on.
Well, today I was looking for some blogs related to camping and RVs — and I started running across all of these blogs filled with ads and little or no content. Whats the deal with these….? So I started doing a lttle more looking and then remembered something that I had read a few days ago on Performancing.com in an article called Exclusive: Google Teaches Bloggers How To Rank, a blog “interview with senior Google engineer Matt Cutts. One of the questions and its answer deals with Blogger’s “splogs” problem. Ahah!
According to Wikipedia,
Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, 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. Content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites with an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.
Spam blogs — why am I not surprised?
I’ll say it again. This should be upsetting to anyone who has a real blog! — at least to those who are interested in having others find their blog and visit it.
Again from Wikipedia:
Splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google’s Blogspot service. These fake blogs waste valuable disk space and bandwidth as well as polluting search engine results, ruining blog search engines and damaging bloggers community networking (e.g. Blogspot’s next blog link). Google’s search engine uses PageRank, which is very vulnerable to link flooding, especially from highly weighted bloggers.”
Like spam and phishing, splogs, as far I’m concerned, are created for the most part by unethical people who are only interested in making money without making any contribution.
Today’s links:
- BlogMaverickA splog here, a splog there, pretty soon it ads up… and we all lose
- The New York Times
- Wired: How to Fight Those Surging Splogs
- The RSS Blog – State of the Splogosphere
- The Wall Stree Journal – ‘Splogs’ Roil Web, and Some Blame Google
- Splog Reporter
- Toronto Star – Advanced ads, or attack of the splog people
- Guardian Unlimited – Cashing in on fake blogs
Post from one of my abandoned blogs – North Farnham Freeholder – recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine 2/28/2011 – page
