There are many names being created for the offensive, growing mass of spam blogs like spamnami, splogicane, splogsplosion, splogquake, splogstorm and the splog flu. But no matter what you call them spam blogs have quickly become the blogging industry's biggest problem. Perhaps calling it The Splog Flu might work best since splogs (spam blogs) seem to be growing at an ever increasing rate and infecting more and more services. Google's Blogger service has been blamed for the majority of the splogs and over the weekend they were attacked by a splognami of over 10,000 splogs. ZDNet reports that this past weekend there was a huge splog assault.
The search giant's Blogger blog-creation tool and BlogSpot hosting service, together the most popular free blogging service on the Web, fell victim this past weekend to the biggest splog attack yet -- an assault that led to clogged RSS readers and overflowing in-boxes, and that may have manipulated search engine rankings.
"Uh, ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, I think we have an emergency on our hands," Tim Bray, Web technologies director at Sun Microsystems, wrote in his blog in response to what he called the "splogsplosion."
Blogspot.com is not alone -- MSN has also been accused of having lots of spam blogs on MSN Spaces. And spam blogs are heavily impacting the blog search engines. In his recent State of the Blogosphere report Technorati CEO David Sifry said 5.8% of all blog posts are Technorati are spam. However, a ClickZ article says the number of blog posts that are spam could be as high as 50%.
Just how bad is the problem? According to Glance and Kadayam (who count blogs for a living) nearly 30 percent of blog posts today are spam. That's a conservative estimate, they say, and doesn't factor in the net total of spam comments, which could be upwards of 50 percent.
Spam blogs are such a big deal, there's now a word for it: splog. According to Wikipedia, splog 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 Web sites." Wikipedia further notes, "splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google's Blogger service."
The splogs create huge problems for the blog search engines according to a recent Wall Street Journalarticle.
Spammers have created millions of Web logs to promote everything from gambling Web sites to pornography. The spam blogs -- known as "splogs" -- often contain gibberish, and are full of links to other Web sites spammers are trying to promote. Because search engines like those of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. base their rankings of Web sites, in part, on how many other Web sites link to them, the splogs can help artificially inflate a site's popularity. Some of the phony blogs also carry advertisements, which generate a few cents for the splog's owner each time they are clicked on.
The phony blogs are a particular problem for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo because each offers not only a Web search engine focused on providing the most relevant results for users but also a service to let bloggers create blogs.
The Wall Street Journal article even lists some tools spammers use to create instant splogs. Here are a few other recent articles and posts on the splog topic:
There are many names being created for the offensive, growing mass of spam blogs like spamnami, splogicane, splogsplosion, splogquake, splogstorm and the splog flu. But no matter what you call them spam blogs have quickly become the blogging industry's biggest problem. Perhaps calling it The Splog Flu might work best since splogs (spam blogs) seem to be growing at an ever increasing rate and infecting more and more services. Google's 
