The Growing Splog Scourge
Most bloggers have encountered a spam blog or "splog" at one time or another. Yet few bloggers now realize the extent of the "splogosphere." According to a May 2006 study by Tim Finin of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 56% of pings from Web logs were English-language splogs1.
How Splogs Work
Splogs are blogs used by spammers to promote commercial Web sites. They contain mostly gibberish accompanied by links and ads for various commercial offerings. Most legitimate bloggers are growing accustomed to stumbling across these splogs. One example of how sploggers achieve their ends is to use software to automatically create large numbers of splogs. This software scours the Internet, copying text that it finds that is appealing keywords or keyword phrases - search terms that sploggers think users will type into search engines. The software pastes these keyword phrases into the splog and places an ad beside this text. The goal is to lure ordinary bloggers to click on these ads. Using the pay-per-click advertising model that is now commonplace online, sploggers receive a small fee from the advertiser for each click on the ad.
Sploggers make money when there are large numbers of clicks on these ads. In order to make as much money as possible, sploggers try to attain as high a ranking as possible in Google and other search engine results, thus maximizing the number of visits to their splogs. One of the primary criteria for placing high in search results is the number of links to the site from other sites. Sploggers exploit this by creating networks of sites (thousands of them, in some cases) that link to each other, thus artificially increasing the ranking of the featured sites in search engine results.
In addition to creating networks of fake blogs, sploggers also assume control of inactive blogs. Due to the relative infancy of blogging, a very large number of blogs are abandoned, providing a playground for sploggers. Sploggers also use automated software to place their gibberish and ads in existing active blogs. These ads, in turn, link to their splogs. At the same time, sploggers create spam portals or "sportals" that are made up of large numbers of pay-per-click ads or links. One of the splogger's goals is to bring as many people as possible to these sportals, to maximize their pay-per-click revenue.
Almost Nobody Wins
Besides the sploggers themselves, almost nobody wins as a result of the huge number of splogs. Google and other search engines do not want to provide useless search results to their visitors. Users are frustrated because the deluge of splogs impairs their ability to find the information they seek. Blog hosts seek to preserve their reputation by preventing sploggers from taking control of their blogs.
The bigger picture issue here is the potential erosion of the openness of the blog revolution. Characterized by content generated and updated by users communally, will blogging be threatened by splogging? Because the blog medium is vulnerable to this form of spamming due to its openness, some fear that the only way to tame the wild growth of splogging is to introduce some controls or reduce the openness of the medium - effectively defeating the raison d'etre of blogs and social networking philosophy. Ways to reduce splogging are being introduced. These include software that can distinguish splogs from legitimate blogs to eliminate splogs from search results. Another method is use of protective codes called "Captchas"(distorted images of numbers and letters) that people can input when posting content, but that automated software has difficulty emulating. But concerns remain about the long-term viability of blogging and social networking sites in the face of rampant splogging.
Given the popularity and openness of blogging, blogs (and splogs) may one day also offer a tempting medium for cyber criminals to launch malicious Web-based attacks. Trend Micro will continue to monitor the evolution of splogging and this potential threat.
Reference
- 1. Pranam Kolari and Akshay Java and Tim Finin, "Characterizing the Splogosphere," Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics, 15th World Wid Web Conference, May 23, 2006, http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/_file_directory_/papers/261.pdf.
Sources
Charles C. Mann, "Spam +Blogs = Trouble," Wired magazine, September 2006, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/splogs.html
Spam Blog, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/spam_blog.
Ken Colburn, "Splogs and Sportals," Lockergnome, October 13, 2006, http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/windows/2006/10/13/splogs-and-sportals
