As Blogosphere Grows So Does ‘Splog’

Splog is to blogging as spam is to email – and in either case, consumers are turned off by it. Technorati, the worlds largest blog tracking company, is currently watching about 55.5 million blogs worldwide. According to the company, there are about 75,000 new blogs appearing every day.

by Kristina Knight

Unfortunately, a good number of new blogs are spam-blogs, or ‘splogs’. According to Wikipedia, splogs are sites created solely to promote affiliated websites. This increases the pagerank of the site. Most of the content is text or ads stolen from other sites or simply nonsense.

Technorati estimates that the blogosphere is doubling every 6 months or so and that about 8% of new blogs are actually splogs. If the splog sites could be easily marked or quarantined like spam, there wouldn’t be the problem there is today. But splogs are much harder to detect. About 70% of pings on Technorati are from known spam sources, and the company is working to create good detection software to keep spam posts off of blogs and to cut down on the number of splog sites in the blogosphere.

Until the technology catches up with the blogosphere, the best thing you can do as a blogger is to keep an eye on your account. Track it using Technorati or some other software to see how your site is viewed.