Splogs Suck

This site has only been up for about a week and already a splog, or spam blog, had gotten a hold of it.

Splogs are “fake” blogs whose content is usually entirely stolen from legitimate blogs. In this case, I wrote a post last week that cited Wikipedia and contained a tag for Wikipedia. I believe this is how the splog in question ripped off my content. Splogs I’ve had experience with will re-post information from any blog that shows up in a Technorati or Google Blog Search feed with a particular tag or keyword.

The splog will attempt to get my content indexed in search engines to generate traffic to the splog’s site which is usually inundated with paid advertising links (read: pr0n).

Often, too, the splog will send a pingback to the original blog. Pingbacks (also known as trackbacks) are used to notify a blog that another blog has cited information from a particular post. The pingback will appear as a snippet of the new post in the comments section of the cited post. This a great feature because it allows easy link trading between bloggers with similar interests, and it gives credit to the original author.

The problem with splogs sending pingbacks are now the sucker gets a link in my comments to his/her rip-off of my post. Fortunately, Akismet is catching on to these and will file it as spam before it hits my blog.

There’s nothing I can do about the bastard stealing my content (except to change the content, or play the sucker), really, but the silver lining in spam blog is that I know my site is being searched and indexed!

Splog in question: http://wikipedia.doorwayblogging.info/ (NSFW)