Also Known As:
Spam Blogs, Link Spamming, Spamdexing, Search Engine Spamming

Description:
The term Splog refers to a spam campaign directed against blogs. The people who Splog are Sploggers. Why would Sploggers want to Splog? The answer is money. And the key to understanding this spamming-type scam rests with how search engines rate Web sites.

Everyone with a service or product to sell on the Internet wants their Internet site to be listed as high up as possible in a keyword search for that product or service. Two of the criteria search engine technology uses to raise the standing of a Web site involves the popularity of the site and the number of links to it. The greater the number of visitors and links to the site, the higher it can rise on the search results page. Most businesses work hard to market their site to the public and gain visitors and links. Others use spamming techniques called Link Spamming, Spamdexing, and Search Engine Spamming to create the illusion of popularity by fooling the search engines.

Crooks are now exploiting the popularity of blogs and the technology for creating blogs to perform a type of Link Spamming. Sploggers have the ability to easily and cheaply generate tens of thousands of faked blogs. These fakes have links to commercial sites. The result is that the linked sites ascend the search engine ladder.

Sploggers can also fraudulently bring in advertising revenue by creating links to legitimate businesses. Anytime a consumer clicks through to one of these businesses from a faked blog, the spammer earns advertising money. Splogging also clogs search engines and wastes people’s time. This problem is complex, and no one foresees an easy, or early, solution.

What do you call a massive spam attack on blogs? A spamalanche.