Splog Clog

This Wall Street Journal report details the latest fight for your clicks now being waged in the blogosphere.

As noted here, "Splogging" is a term coined by Mark Cuban to describe blogs with no added value (wait a minute, that sounds like this blog), existing solely to trick people into visiting and exposing them to advertising. Splogs are often encountered in two ways: by searching for a key word on a search engine, or receiving it as a fradulent hit through your RSS aggregator. More often than not, they're automated, linking to countless blogs and other websites, using keywords selected solely to attract more eyeballs and click-throughs for their advertising. And automation means that splogs are being created at a dizzying pace, to the point that when you do a search for almost any term, you're bound to get a bunch of hits that are nothing but money-hungry splogs. Splogs are used to increase the page ranking of a website in Google. It is a way to game the Google system, to get one's website to appear higher up on the result list for particular searches. Splogs work by generating a lot of links. They are not real blogs; instead, their content is generated by randomly grabbing chunks of text from other blogs. And they are easy to create, given that Google's Blogger service allows anybody to create a blog for free. They are often constructed automatically by computer programs.

Pictured is an image of an apparent splog.