Splogs, or spam blogs, are the latest marketing tools for black-hat SEOs and marketers. What they do is – set up a bunch of meaningless blogs for the sake of linking out to their prized websites in hopes of increasing their organic rankings in the search engines. This technique has been around for some years since the emergence of blogs as a powerful publishing platform, but it’s gotten more noticeable lately.
Are splogs good or bad? Well, this answer depends on which side of the street you’re on. Some SEOs have no guilt about using splog networks to build new links. While, others feel it is a black-hat technique and should be avoided. The SEOs using splog networks would argue that since they are taking a risk at getting caught, that they should reap the rewards of splog links. The SEOs opposing it, would argue that it is unethical and creates an uneven playing field. Regardless of which side of the argument you’re on, it’s undeniable that it works.
Why splogs still work
Even with Google working hard to filter these types of blogs, their spam-catching technology is still a work in progress. You shouldn’t blame Google though – how can you expect a computer to do a human’s job perfectly? Unless there are some drastic advancements to the spam-catching technology, there will always be some splogs that avoid Google’s radar. Furthermore, sploggers can continue to create new blogs as the old ones get caught.
While running some competitive backlink analysis on some websites (I won’t say any names), I noticed that these websites had backlinks mostly from these splogs. According to Yahoo Site Explorer, one site showed over 2,500 backlinks. I would estimate that around 95% of this site’s backlinks were from splogs. Then, I checked Google. Google showed a lot less backlinks – around 60. While Google was able to filter most of the splog links, a small percentage of them did slip through the cracks.
So, how do you spot a splog? Well, if you’ve been in the SEO business for a while, it would be quite easy for you to spot one. However, if you’re new to the Internet or SEO, you might have a tough time spotting one.
Here are some common characteristics of a splog:
- Blog posts make no sense and have numerous grammatical errors.
- Domain names that have been dropped, or domains that do not match the blog topics.
- Every blog post contains multiple links to commercial websites.
- Topics about everything and anything. One minute they’re talking about car insurance and the next minute, they’re writing about viagra or casinos.
- Blog posts with no structure or formatting. I’ve actually seen blogs that had a single 10,000+ word blog post with no sentence structure or paragraph breaks. I’m assuming these are simply scraper blogs.
- Blogs that have not updated their “about us” page. Sometimes they still have the default WordPress verbiage.
- Blogs that have no contact page.
