A spam blog, also known as an auto blog or the
neologism
In linguistics, a neologism (; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered ...
splog, is a
blog
A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...
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
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. Accordin ...
or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors (see
made for AdSense 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 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
Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) ( ) is a type of challenge–response authentication, challenge–response turing test used in computing to determine whether the user is human in order to de ...
*
Blog scraping
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Link farm
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Spam in blogs
*
Spamdexing
References
External links
Blogger: About Spam BlogsSVMs for the Blogosphere: Blog Identification and Splog Detection* ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'', 17 November 2005
"Cashing in on fake blogs"
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