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Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. 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, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to 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 an high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.

Splogs sometimes choose a name similar to a popular blog in order to benefit from the occasional incoming link from careless bloggers, who think they are linking to the popular site.

AntiLeech Plugin to prevent content theft by Sploggers

Plugin Name: AntiLeech

AntiLeech Plugin URL:

http://redalt.com/Resources/Plugins/AntiLeech

Download Plugin:

http://redalt.com/Resources/Plugins/AntiLeech/download/antileech

Description:

AntiLeech helps prevent content theft by sploggers. AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.

AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string (an identifier that some bots send when they are collecting data), or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. When a visitor with a qualifying (any checked option on the options page) User-Agent or IP address visites your site, they will see only the generated content. They will see it in your page layout and in your feeds. Anywhere you’re normally outputting content, that’s where the fake content will appear to them.

Regular users whose browsers do not match these strings will see your normal content. RSS aggregators should be able to display your content normally, too.

AntiLeech will tell you on what page it first saw the User-Agent, if it can, to help you better make the decision to block that User-Agent or not.

Other known Splog Defenses

Several splog reporting services have been created for good willed users to report splog with plans of offering these splog URLs to search engines so that they can be excluded from search results. Splog Reporter was the first service of this kind. Then came SplogSpot which actually maintains a large database of splogs and makes it available to the public via APIs, and A2B which blocks web server IP addresses that splog URLs resolve to. There is Feed Copyrighter plugin (for WordPress) which allows you to automatically add copyright messages to feed, so splogs can be easily spotted and reported by visitors or through Google search. There is also TrustRank, which attempts to automatically find them. Blogger has implemented a system that can detect splogs and then force them to take a Captcha ’spell this word’ test.

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