Splogs Threaten Blog Appeal

Spam is quickly rearing its ugly head in the blogosphere, and it could very well turn off people who currently enjoy the value of browsing through blogs. Despite the fact that approximately 800,000 blogs are created each day, according to new research one in five of them is spam.

Boulder, Colorado-based Umbria Communications, a consumer-generated media monitor, has done research on the matter and found that 2.7 million of 20.3 million blogs are splogs, or spam blogs. Umbria estimates that between 10 and 20 percent of blogs on the Web are spam.

Splogs are sites created solely for the purpose of marketing. Many of them use stolen content via RSS feeds to elicit keyword-based ads from Google’s AdSense and other contextual ad programs.

In October, Umbria examined results from three blog search engines: Technorati, IceRocket, and BlogPulse. The research revealed that the search results were riddled with spam sites. On average, 44 of the top 100 results were splogs.

Studies have found that the splog problem is worsening. Howard Kaushansky, CEO of Umbria, says that although many splogs are created to boost search engine rankings for sites, they are more often used to create money from affiliate programs and text ads. Many people blame Google for perpetuating the problem, since its Blogger tool facilitates splogs, and has made them lucrative through their AdSense program. “We noticed a very strong correlation between the date Blogger opened [its application program interface] and when we saw spam starting to explode,” Kaushansky said.

Kaushansky also added that splogs “could become a detractor to people using, enjoying and finding value in the blogosphere.”

Source:

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