If you’ve done a web search recently you may have noticed the explosion of spam blog sites or “Splogs”. These sites are basically designed to attract the attention of search engines, which they do by displaying inane text with key words, or by stealing content from legitimate web sites. They make money by displaying money from well known ad networks.
Wired has just published an expose on splogs (not yet available online). The article highlights a university study that shows that more than half of all blogs are actually splogs. One splogger interviewed for the story claims to have made more than $70,000 in just three months.
Social media blogger Steve Rubel makes a very good point on this issue in a recent blog, where he says that the advertising networks that underpin this business model (and I use this term loosely) should be called into account.
I also think the search engines will need to make a contribution to solving this problem, since most sploggers rely on search engines for traffic. The whole point of a search engine is that it should find useful site. I do realise this is a complex issue, since the sploggers are designing their sites to attract the search engines.