Splog - What It Is and Why It's Bad.

Spam, it ain't just for email marketing anymore. Can you believe that companies pay to have people posting canned comments and creating fake blogs to get their name out there?

I guess I can, we've pretty much seen it all, haven't we? I've really been against creating fake blogs and posting about VerticalResponse on them (definition of splog). For a while we hired someone to post our white papers on sites and try to get our articles in ezines but it was turning out that they may have splogged a bit. I just think it's unethical. Some even outsource this task overseas for cheaper rates.

How can you tell if someone is splogging?

1. You visit a blog about healthy diets and you see a blog post from an email marketing company that is completely unrelated and clearly not written by the writer.
2. You just simply click on the about us on the blog and the default text comes up "Here's where you write about yourself."
3. Each post you see has pretty much the exact same copy with a line or two written just a bit differently.

It's pretty easy for those who are technical to automatically create blogs and fill them with content via RSS and ads. Affiliate programs have grown by leaps and bounds because of this. (We *try* to monitor our own affiliates.)

Why do companies splog? They get more exposure, have more inbound links, use tons of keywords and hopefully the search engines pick them up and rise them to the top.

I actually got this spam email this weekend:

Dear Janine
I am writing you today to introduce myself, and my company, #$%^Services. We've got a hot new service that enables your organization to take advantage of the latest phenomenon, youtube.com. We can take an existing television ad, or create one for you, and post it to youtube, metacafe.com, miro.com, weshow.com, knockatv.com,videomsn, aolvideo, yahoovideo and dozens of other rising stars in the internet video space. We offer dedicated staff to add laudatory comments, based upon customer, staff, and vendor comments, to blogs underneath these videos as well as create new blogs touting the features, advantages, and benefits of your solutions. These dedicated resources will also visit and post laudatory comments to industry specific web forums related to your organization.

Fake blogs and fake comments..hmmm.

I think we'll do the best we can by monitoring and go the old-fashioned route and have someone here at VR track what people are saying about us online. Then WE can post comments that tout our services or answer questions from within VR, not outsource it and give canned comments or splog. When you see someone posting a comment from VerticalResponse, it'll be an employee who works here and knows what to say.

I had to vent when I saw some of our competitors in this space stooping. I'm tired of this littering of the internet, aren't you?

Comments

[Miriam]

I just realized that my blog is being scraped in a major way by sploggers. I wrote about it, and my readers gave me good tips on identifying and stopping sploggers. I did a little more research, and wrote a post with 10 tips on preventing sploggers: http://wordpressgarage.com/tips/10-steps-to-a-more-splog-free-wordpress-blog/.

[Ivan]

And the growing number of blogs have a simple button where you can order an article (blog post) for just a few dollars...

[John Sadler]

What a pain in the neck! There is no end to what gets put on blogs, but to artificially create blogs and comment to get traffic flies in the face of the spirit of social networking. Having said that if someone can make a buck they will do it. I do get occasional irrelevant comments usually about drugs or credit cards, which are usually caught by Akismet, but I am only a small drip in a huge spam ocean.

[Dana Sumar]

Hi There,
Very good articles. Arent'we all sick of spam?
The lastest craze it seems to me is to go to websites with an estore and instead of buying send aspam order filled with their junk with a stupid comment like ... What a cool site.....
I'm receiving now about 10 of these daily and really do not know what to do...
Regards,
Dana

[Gloria Jean]

Interesting that you would have this post. I totally agree with you about people saying who they are and really using their face and name and posting the truth not just empty words to make a sale. I just read information today on this subject and how people can do this by making different accounts and pretending to be a different person. I too am tired of spam and now splog ... thank you for stating this. It does make a difference in how I feel about your company ....we need more people to speak out.

[Boris Mahovac - Your Ezine Coach]

Recently I became painfully aware of this when I discovered that a subscriber was posting complete issues of my ezine to his fake blog. There's nothing else on his blog except the content of my ezine - even the removal confirmation messages from my autoresponder [sic]. This appears to have been accomplished by redirecting messages from an email account he created specifically for this purpose. The only reason I see him doing this is to create fodder for search engines, and then make money from AdSense ads he's running on his blog. Here's the URL http://ezinecoachadvances.blogspot.com/

I guess I should do a blog myself - I just found out how easy it can be!