A spam blog, also known as an auto blog or the
neologism splog, is a
blog which the author uses to promote affiliated websites, to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites or to simply sell links/ads.
The purpose of a splog can be to increase the
PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors (see
made for AdSense
A scraper site is a website that copies content from other websites using web scraping. The content is then mirrored with the goal of creating revenue, usually through advertising and sometimes by selling user data. Scraper sites come in various f ...
or MFA-blogs), and/or use the blog as a link outlet to sell links or get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are usually a type of
scraper site, where content is often either
inauthentic text
{{Unreferenced, date=July 2016
An inauthentic text is a computer-generated expository document meant to appear as genuine, but which is actually meaningless. Frequently they are created in order to be intermixed with genuine documents and thus man ...
or merely stolen (see ''
blog scraping'') from other websites. These blogs usually contain a high number of
links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.
This is used often in conjunction with other
spamming techniques, including ''
spings''.
History
The term splog was popularized around mid August 2005 when it was used publicly by
Mark Cuban,
[Cuban's original post is archived her]
It developed from multiple
linkblogs that were trying to influence search indexes and others trying to
Google bomb every word in the dictionary.
See also
*
Adversarial information retrieval
*
CAPTCHA
*
Blog scraping
*
Link farm
*
Spam in blogs
Spam in blogs (also known as blog spam, comment spam, or social spam) is a form of Spamdexing. (Note that ''blog spam'' also has another meaning, specifically when a blog author creates posts without adding any informational or educational value ...
*
Spamdexing
Spamdexing (also known as search engine spam, search engine poisoning, black-hat search engine optimization, search spam or web spam) is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building ...
References
External links
Blogger: About Spam BlogsSVMs for the Blogosphere: Blog Identification and Splog Detection* ''
The Guardian'', 17 November 2005
"Cashing in on fake blogs"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Spam Blog
Black hat search engine optimization
Blogs
Spamming