Splogs
Spam blogs are becoming more prevalent. Like spam e-mail, people set up these blogs to promote products, Web sites, etc., etc.
"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,"
explains this Wall Street Journal article I noticed on beSpacific.
The Search Engine Watch blog points to two presentations about Web spam.
Scott of Feedster has been writing about issues with splogs for a while. As someone running a search engine, he has to figure out what to do with them–should Feedster index splogs? He points to a splog filled with comment spam, gives a number of splogs Feedster stopped indexing recently, and shares a conversation with a spammer.
(By the way, in some of my recent talks, I’ve mentioned blogs with links to various versions of feeds. Scott’s blog has links to several versions of RSS and Atom from the navbar.)
