Blogging Industry Infected With Splog Flu

Posted on October 20, 2005

There are many names being created for the offensive, growing mass of spam blogs like spamnami, splogicane, splogsplosion, splogquake, splogstorm and the splog flu. But no matter what you call them spam blogs have quickly become the blogging industry's biggest problem. Perhaps calling it The Splog Flu might work best since splogs (spam blogs) seem to be growing at an ever increasing rate and infecting more and more services. Google's Blogger service has been blamed for the majority of the splogs and over the weekend they were attacked by a splognami of over 10,000 splogs.

CNet reports that this past weekend there was a huge splog assault. It is being described as the biggest splog attack in history. Tim Bray, Web technologies director at Sun Microsystems, called it a "splogsplosion."

Blogspot.com is not alone -- MSN has also been accused of having lots of spam blogs on MSN Spaces. And spam blogs are heavily impacting the blog search engines. In hi recent State of the Blogosphere Technorati CEO David Sifry said 5.8% of all blog posts are Technorati are spam. However, a ClickZ article says the number of blog posts that are spam could be as high as 50%.

The splogs create huge problems for the blog search engines according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. It says splogs can "artificially inflate a site's popularity."

SearchEngineJournal.com reports that there is a new spam search engine called SplogSpot that has created a searchable database of splogs.

Google says it is using CAPTCHAs to try and cut back on the amount of spam associated with Blogger.com and Blogspot.com.