Spam + Blog = Splogs

Sources: Google

Blogging services can be both used and abused. Currently, there is a new type of blog which is not a legitimate type of blog with the sole purpose of spamming is known as Splogs, unlike typical blogs such as political blog, fashion blog, travel blog and education blog, in which its main purpose is information sharing (Kane 2005). Splogs is an artificially created weblog site in which its main purpose is to promote or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites (Mann 2006). Now, it is one of the newest frontiers which has created much chaos towards the internet traffic and it is the latest threat towards the blogoshpere, as people often felt that Splogs or spam is disturbing and irritating as its purpose is mainly to create attention and to lure people to click on it, as they are able to obtain big bucks out of it

Example of Splogs (Sources: Google)

Splogs- The dark side of blogging?

There is statistical evidence which illustrates that 56 percent of active English language blogs are spam blogs which eventually leads to a threat towards the blogoshpere, as spam blogs are merely fake which have irrelevant, irrational text, along with enormous numbers of links which conquer almost the whole page on the site (Pollit 2005). The splog issue has grown rapidly, before being realised that it has developed into a phenomenon whereby it accounts for 60% of internet traffic, in which it has waste valuable disk space and bandwidth and also polluted the search engines results with unrelated links and creates artificial blogs with attention grabbing heading such as “5 ways to slim within 20 minutes”, as from there they are able to drive traffic to their site (Kane 2005). There are theories which explains spam as a promotional genre, in which it has communicative purpose to persuade or inform potential customers regarding a product or service and then engaged them in immediate interaction with the seller (Barron 2006). Besides that, spam has an important element which ‘captures attention’ moves which comes along with hyperlink and attention grabbing subject line, whereby the function is to arouse potential customer’s interest to view and click the advertisement (Barron 2006).

How does it work?

The top of list causing the splog explosion is “Google”, the ultimate search engine, as they are held responsible for the splog issues, in which splogger earn money from advertising placed in their splog by using the Google’s Adsense service (Pollit 2005). Splogs has a variety of selection, from beauty and health to gambling and dating services. In this case we take dating services as an example, in which on the site of dating related splog, Adsense advertisement plays an important role in linking it to related dating services sites, which appears not only one but hundreds of them (Mann 2006).

Fighting splogs

All in all, splogs is simply a blog which plagiarise other blogger’s idea and put it in the content which makes no sense after all, as the main idea is to hit the search engine rankings in order to drive people to related sites. Therefore, something has to be done to overcome these arising issues as it has a great impact towards the blogosphere as well as the internet traffic. Firstly, when we notice splogs we can report it to grass-root service Splog Reporter, as they can identify splogs and alerting search engines to remove them from their indexes (Pollit 2005). Then, we can voice about splogs to respective bodies which will take action against them by setting up additional barriers in the blog-creation-process (Lee 2005).



Reference List

Barron, A 2006, 'Understanding spam:A macro-textual analysis', Journal of Pragmatics, vol 38 pp.884-889.


Kane, M 2005, Spam, spam, spam and blogs, CnetNews.com, viewed 5th June 2008,
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-5899385-7.html?tag=bl>


Lee, N 2005, How to Fight Those Surging Splogs,Wired, viewed 6th June 2008,
<http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/10/69380>


Mann, C.C 2005, Spam + Blogs = Trouble, Wired, viewed 5th June 2008,
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/splogs.html>


Pollit, M 2005, Cashing in on fake blogs, The Guardian, viewed 6th June 2008,
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/nov/17/newmedia.media>