Fri - January 6, 2006

Splog


Word of the day

If you scrutinize the web after certain traces of conversations regarding, say, your blog or your name, pretty often you'll get to some weird page resembling a blog — only it's not. It's mostly rubbish mixed with real entries collected from real blogs, including your own.

You found a splog. Wikipedia:

Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites with an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.

Wired:

Enterprising scammers manipulate the affiliate system by creating phony blogs - spam blogs, or splogs - that automatically generate content by continually copying bits from other Web sites, mixing in popular keywords, then signing up the resulting mélange as a Google or Yahoo! affiliate. By using software to link themselves repeatedly to well-known real blogs, splogs trick search engines into listing them high on their results list, thus generating traffic, which in turn generates ad clicks. When unsuspecting Internet searchers visit splogs, they end up clicking the ad links in a frustrated attempt to find some coherent text. Thousands of splogs exist, snarling the blogosphere - and the search engines that index it - in spam. Splogs are too profitable to be readily discouraged. According to RSS to Blog, a Brooklyn-based firm that sells automatic-blog software, sploggers can earn tens of thousands of dollars a month in PPC income, all without any human effort.

Take for instance the aptly named "Some title" blog, hosted at http://myblog788.1greatblog32.info. Whois info about the domain name 1greatblog32.info: "Registrant Name: Dan Goggins, 241 W 100 S, Springville, UT 84663, Registrant Email: jonasandgoggins@gmail.com". This splog collects bits and pieces from over the web and mixes them with links towards pages that carry Google ads.

The liked pages are 1guccisunglasses32.info, 1airamericaradio32.info, 1playstationcheatcodes32.info, 1hotnurses32.info, 1greendayamericanidiot32.info, 1southeastflorida32.info, 1bargraph32.info.

That's a pattern, isn't it? Feed this crap to a whois server and you'll get the same "Registrant Name: Dan Goggins, 241 W 100 S, Springville, UT 84663, Registrant Email: jonasandgoggins@gmail.com".

Dig some more and you'll find that the same person own urls like 1greatsite.info 2greatsite.info, 3greatsite.info and so on and so forth.

Yes, now you get it. This is a large-scale click fraud operation.

Posted Fri - January 6, 2006 at 12:23 PM
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