By SCOTT DEWING
Published: October 2006

WHEN I FIRST HEARD the term splogging, I thought of slogging, as in “slogging through the mud.” As it turns out, the two are not that far apart. Splogging is what happens when spam meets blogging and slogging is to “make one’s way with at a slow heavy pace”, which is what it will feel like to search for information on the Web if splogging is not stopped.

Blogs are websites that contain chronological postings by the blog’s author, commonly referred to as a blogger. There are approximately 70 million blogs currently on the Web. That number is growing daily. Many of us have probably been to a blog before either via a link from a website or as the result of a search using a major search engine such as Google.

Spam blogs—or splogs—are the unfortunate result of spammers using blogs to make money. By using automated software, sploggers scour the Web, automatically copying text that includes potential search terms: book titles, names, news events, recipes, etc. That search-term-rich text is then auto-assembled into gibberish and presented to search engines as a legitimate blog worthy of being indexed and presented as a relevant source of information.

Of course, no one actually reads the crap that is pumped out at splogs, which begs the question: How do sploggers make any money? A good question. And the answer is, interestingly, linked directly to the search engines (i.e., Google, Yahoo!, MSN) who want to eliminate splogs from their search results. Sploggers make their money—sometimes pennies at a time—by getting unsuspecting viewers to click on pay-per-click advertisements that are displayed adjacent to the nonsensical text. Those pay-per-click advertisements are offered through online advertising services, such as Google’s AdSense. In Google’s case, more than 70 percent of the company’s annual revenue comes from its advertising services.

Believe it or not, splogging actually works. As with email spam and telemarketing, it’s just a numbers game in which spammers only need to get a fraction of the visitors they’ve lured to a splog to click on an ad link and make some cash.

“The three main search engines [Google, Yahoo! And MSN] are gateways to a huge percentage of the global economy,” said Anil Dash, vice-president of the blog hosting company Six Apart. According to Dash, it only takes a small number of people to click on the ad link for the splogger “to make a lot of money.”

Fueled by easy automation and greed, splogging is quickly becoming a growing problem on the Web. According to researchers at the University of Maryland, more than 50 percent of English-language blogs are spam blogs. And while legitimate bloggers working in the blogosphere are creating about 300,000 new postings per day, the roboware in the splogosphere is cranking out 900,000 per day.

“The ever-increasing number of splogs is a significant problem that we have to combat,” said Google’s Blogspot manager Jason Goldman. Google’s Blogspot (blogger.com) is one of the largest free blogging services available on the Web with more than 14 million blogs according to The Blog Herald, which actively tracks the trends in the blogosphere.

In addition to creating phony blogs, sploggers will inundate the comments feature of blogs with automated comments that contain links. For example, a splogger comment at a legitimate blog site might go like this, “A very insightful post! For more information about this topic, click here.” Of course the “click here” doesn’t actually go to any relevant content; rather, it takes unsuspecting readers to a ad site. Or worse, it might lead to a sportal. As it’s name indicates, a sportal is like a web portal, which acts as a gateway to news, forums, and other packaged web content. A sportal, however, is a gateway to spam sites, a virtual cornucopia of click-able content that leads only deeper into a bottomless morass of spam.

While splogs and splogging may be annoying, they are not illegal. Blog services like Google’s Blogspot and Technorati are working to create methods for identifying splogs and sifting them out from legitimate blogs and thus eliminate them from search results.

But even if they succeed in creating clever methods for identifying and canning today’s slogging exploits, the war against spam will not end there. As soon as companies like Google improve their ability to identify spam, the spammers come up with new ways to exploit the open access, low cost and flexibility of the Web. Meanwhile, those of us who just want to use the wonderful tools of the Web—search engines, blogs, websites, email—are left slogging through the spammers’ digital mud.