SplogSpot Spam Blog Search Engine
Splogs, spam blogs, got alot of attention over the weekend as hundreds of thousands of fake blogs were launched via the Google Blogger / BlogSpot interface resulting in some trashed search results and feed aggregators.
Jim Hedger, columnist for SEJ and editor at Stepforth, says that “Splogs most often get their content by scraping, the process of sending an electronic copying bot to take everything it sees, recreating it on an unlimited number of instant documents. By running advertising generated through the AdSense program, the owners of the splogs make money when visitors click on the ads. In other words, literally millions of instant sites have sprung up over the past twelve months, most of which are free-hosted Blogs, containing content scraped out from the original sites.” Since a lot of these splogs run Google AdSense, Google is making a bit of revenue off of blog spamming.
Enter SplogSpot, the spam blog search engine which is keeping track of spam blogs or Splogs. The SplogSpot database can be queried by anyone using the SplogSpot API. This will help blog related services, directories etc keep their sites clean.
SplogSpot mainly feeds on the blacklist that Pingoat generates. Pingoat has automated software that can detect spam blogs. SplogSpot also accepts manual splog submissions, that are first reviewed and then added to the database.
SplogSpot says that “maintaining a database of spam blogs will help to avoid splogs whenever possible. Also, on request, the SplogSpot spam database will be made available to any good willed person or project. And the most important of all, you can use the SplogSpot API to determine the genuinty of a blog, when handling blogs in your custom built application or anything like that.”
SplogSpot is owned by 18 year old Kailash Nadh, who may be receiving a call sometime from Mark Cuban, who has also made it one of his life goals to stomp out blog spam. This would be a nice addition to IceRocket.
