I found my first link to a splog here at BDBO and followed it.
What a pain.
So what is a Splog?
A splog is a spam blog–that is, a fake blog that is created for the sole purpose of getting a high search engine “page rank” to reap profits through ad clicks, or to drive customers to an otherwise obscure e-commerce site. Just like e-mail spam, splogs don’t take a rocket scientist to create, but can be built by simple automatic scripts or programs that abuse services like Blogspot, Moveable Type, Wordpress, or Google’s Blogger.com.
Have you found any yet in your referrrers?
It was so unbelievably fake, even though it tried to look like a person ran it.
To keep itself alive, a splog will crawl the Internet using directories, search engines, RSS feeds, etc., collecting information to give the appearance that a real person is adding content. In many cases, this involves automated “theft” of original and often copyrighted content from other authors, without their knowledge, permission, or even attribution.
They mostly use key search terms hundreds of times to drive their rankings up –one dance instructor found the world dance on a 2048 word page.
Slogs have no compunction automatically directing a reader to another site.
A lot needs to be done to relieve some of the pressure on the blogging community.
Published 2 years, 9 months ago
Search
Subscribe 
You are currently browsing the Bene Diction Blogs On weblog archives.
Related Entries
For blog design, Wordpress or MovableType coding or blog consulting, see cre8d design.
Wakey wakey BD. You posted the same article twice. I know you are not over your pneumonia yet, you should be resting, not blogging.
Sherm
Thanks. Fixed.
Bene:
Were you refering to Darren Rowse in this post.
His activities have become increasing concerning but I am reluctant to go public with any criticism.
I think Darren writes all his own material on his various product blogs, but I don’t know for sure.
Maybe he can answer.
I know people are paid to leave comments (not spam mentioning products, but URL’s) - I’ve read at least 300 commenters have been identified.
The splog I saw had a lot of advertisting and plugged a different product each post. The clue was the number of a word mentioned ie: a certain kind of camera, it is obviously done to drive up rankings.
And of course some bloggers take money to put product placement in their posts.
Or as in the post below they accept a free product they can plug on their blog is they wish.
sorry to hear that you’re concerned Joe. Feel free to let me know about your concerns via email if you would like.
My short response - Splogs are generally automated blogs which indescriminantly rip other peoples content off their blogs and don’t produce blogs that are of any use to others. They often don’t give credit for where they get content and will publish full articles of others.
Some of my blogs do use other people’s content in short quotes. My blogs are not automated - it’s all manually found and uploaded content and I try to pick and choose content on a topic that will be useful for readers. On most of my blogs I try to present the topic in a useful way and find that I have a loyal readership that appreciates the way I arrange the blogs. I also always link to the sources of my content and in the process send readers away from my sites.
I also find that other sites that I use content from appreciate what I do because it sends them traffic. In fact many other blogs/sites authors email me letting me know of posts that they’d like me to quote and link to.
I hope that that answers some of your concerns.
As I say you’re always welcome to submit your thoughts to me via email. I appreciate any comments that anyone has as to how to make what I do better.
Darren
Even though you post manually your blogging practice seems to be essentially Splogging.
To take a sample of the blogs that you run:
Paris Hilton Blog (soft porn)
Personal Finance (promoting often questionable investment schemes)
Credit Cards (promoting, amongst other things, credit card use by teenagers)
PDA Review
Laptop Review
Robotics
Printer Review
Secure Instant Messaging
Content Management
Pope Watch
Depression News
all seem to consist almost exclusively of content cut and pasted from other sites for the sole purpose of generating revenue from Adsense. Even though you link back to the source and they are happy with this it seems to me to be gutter journalism at its worst.
Additionally the blogs
Digital Photography Blog
Camera Phone Blog
that you also run are subdomains of livingroom.org.au. “.org.au” domains are “not for profit” and I note that this domain is registered to the BAPTIST UNION OF VICTORIA. It seems wrong to me that a not for profit domain that is registered to the Baptist Union of Victoria is being used for your personal gain.
One could wonder what the “pro” in problogger stands for. It does not seem that it is for “professional” to me.