Spotting a Splog

Splogs are very prevalent in the online community. If we take into consideration the ease in creating and maintaining a blog, thanks to the user-friendly features of Google, then we can assume that these sites are certainly here to stay. But of course, it doesn't mean that we can do nothing about it. What we can do is to avoid these sites. The reason these exist is because there are people who unwittingly visit them, click on the links littered all over them, and in the process earn money for the site administrators. Which would imply that if there is no one visiting them, then splogs will not be able to generate revenue for their owners.

But how to we spot a splog?

Splog can be easily found out by their content. A real blog actually makes sense in how it is published. They would not be repeating paragraphs, changing the line of thought abruptly, nor litter their content with repeating keywords. The content matches the links and the title. And, most importantly, their content would actually try to get your attention. They will have “meat” and will seek to entertain or inform you.

Splogs do not care about matching or having an actual internal design or other normal features. The content will not at all match the links or even the blog's title or the post title. There are even some posts where the signature or the name in the article doesn't match the name of the post author. And if you continue reading the post, you will see that the main idea would change abruptly.

This will also extend to how paragraphs are composed — usually with each paragraph talking about really unrelated subjects — for example, a post that begins about a trip to India turns into a description of a new toy then becomes a paragraph selling some new gadget. Even how the sentences are constructed is made haphazardly, you'd swear some idiot writer just began typing all of the English words he knows. When you see these things happening in a blog you're reading, stop. You're just going to waste your time reading a splog. And also, don't try to leave the page by clicking on the link. You will just generate revenue for the splog's owner, since these links are actually for pay-per-click sites that they host. And there is also cases that spyware and other malware could be downloaded to your computer just by visiting the links.

So be smart. When you encounter a splog, no matter how curious you are, just stop and close the page immediately. There are other more rewarding sites for you to visit.