Splogs Edit

Crappy Computer Generated Sites Used to Attract Google
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Wired Magazine featured a great article about Splogs - the crappy computer generated blogs that are made to attract traffic from search engines like Google.  No doubt you’ve tripped accross these sites in the past.  Expect more of these sites in the future… The article gives a great background about how these sites work (and how they make money).

From Wired:
Like email spam, splogs use the most wonderful features of networked communication – its flexibility, easy access, and low cost – in the service of sleazy get-rich-quick schemes. But whereas email spammers try to induce recipients to buy products, sploggers and other Web spammers make most of their money by getting viewers to click on ads that run adjacent to their nonsensical text. Web page owners – the spammer, in this case – get paid by the advertiser every time someone clicks on an ad.

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. But over the months that I monitored the reaction to my book, they seemed to be rising in number. More and more of the blogs and Web sites that mentioned my book – or any other topic, for that matter – were spam. Some 56 percent of active English-language blogs are spam, according to a study released in May by Tim Finin, a researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and two of his students. “The blogosphere is growing fast,” Finin says. “But the splogosphere is now growing faster.”