'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
Date: October 26, 2005 1:24:56 AM EDT
To: undisclosed-recipient:;
Subject: 'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google



'Splogs' Roil
Web, and Some
Blame Google

By DAVID KESMODEL
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
October 19, 2005; Page B1

Spam, long the scourge of email users, rapidly has become the bane of
bloggers too.

Spammers have created millions of Web logs to promote everything from
gambling Web sites to pornography. The spam blogs -- known as
"splogs" -- often contain gibberish, and are full of links to other
Web sites spammers are trying to promote. Because search engines like
those of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. base their
rankings of Web sites, in part, on how many other Web sites link to
them, the splogs can help artificially inflate a site's popularity.
Some of the phony blogs also carry advertisements, which generate a
few cents for the splog's owner each time they are clicked on.

The phony blogs are a particular problem for Google, Microsoft and
Yahoo because each offers not only a Web search engine focused on
providing the most relevant results for users but also a service to
let bloggers create blogs.

Just this past weekend, Google's popular blog-creation tool, Blogger,
was targeted in an apparently coordinated effort to create more than
13,000 splogs, the search giant said. The splogs were laced with
popular keywords so that they would appear prominently in blog
searches, and several bloggers complained online that that the splogs
were gumming up searches for legitimate sites.

...

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/ 
SB112968552226872712-8b5l_fijhNltE4s7DX6tvLI9XNo_20061025.html




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