Meet the Sploggers

Just yesterday, BlogPulse reported on The Assault on Blog Spam, and Intelliseek CMO Pete Blackshaw wrote about the splog menace for ClickZ and at his Consumer-Generated Media blog. Today, we are pleased to present a guest post from Intelliseek/BlogPulse's esteemed Software Architect, Robert Stockton, who describes common splogger behaviors and exposes their spammy methods.

By Robert Stockton
Software Architect
Intelliseek Applied Research Center

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the "new" flood of spam blogs (aka splogs). It appears that some folks have just come to notice the problem recently, usually when their vanity searches got hit by a particular wave of splog posts.

However, some of us in the trade have been monitoring the splogosphere for a while and consider the newest wave to be just business as usual. Intelliseek and the BlogPulse team have been working on spam blog identification and filtering techniques for quite a while. In fact, the player who got everyone's ire recently (and who I shall, for the purposes of this post, call "Hexadecimal Dan") had been playing the same game for weeks without significant complaint.

To help the rest of the 'sphere feel more comfortable with your less-than-popular neighbors, I'd like to introduce you to some of the other colorful players on the block and their wily splogging ways. I do want to assure all the sploggers out there, however, that this list is by no means complete. If you don't see your name on the list, don't despair: we know about you, and we are watching you.

Hexadecimal Dan: This guy is just a run-of-the mill splogger, though he does produce more volume than most. Until he caught everybody's attention, he pretty regularly named all his blogs with a common word followed by a six digit hexadeximal number. Thus, it was really easy for the folks at Google to filter out those blogs, but you know that he'll change his spots and be back at full volume soon enough. Most of his accounts were caught in the grand purge, but you can check this splog as an example. Note the inclusion of keyword-based clippings from Moreover and the direct hyperlink to "info" site at the bottom of each post. This is a heartwarming example of good ol' down-home link farming.

Max-Volume Pete: Be it football, baseball, or the Breeder's Cup, this guy's schtick is sports, and with site names like Gambling Handicappers, you aren't likely to forget it. He has just one purpose in life, and that is to get you to mvpsportsbook.com (or, if you are too smart for that, one of the 40 other betting sites referenced at the same time). For all I know, he actually writes his own original material, but he's so proud of it that he'll simultanously post dozens of copies of each article. Then he'll come back later and do it again in case the first few dozen didn't get your attention.

Affiliate Fraud Fred: Fred is a lot like Pete, except that he's into sex. (Again, with site names like (warning!) Nude Amateur Wife, he's not terribly subtle about it, though some of the names get pretty creative.) He really wants to get you into the Adult Friend Finder network. The nifty thing about Fred is that you'll probably never even see one of his blogs. He's set them up with some javascript frame-busters so that you end up directly at adultfriendfinder (or "shaggle") without ever seeing the intermediate blog, and he'll make sure that any enclosing frames are taken out in the process. (As a side note, in case you think that spam blogs are typically caught and cleaned out quickly, the above-mentioned blog was populated on July 26th and is still happily sitting where it was established).

Search Term Sally: You know that Sally is all about search engine optimization, because she builds her posts by pasting popular search terms into pre-built templates. You might mistake the result (such as the text at BSNN) for human-written text if English is your third language, or you are a computerized grammar-checker, but probably not. The links on the page take you to a maze of cross-linked pages without a bit of content, but that's all right. The only entity who was supposed to read it was the Google spider.

Pen-Pal Patty: You probably don't think that any of Patty's creations (such as Samantha Arthur Diary) are splogs at all. They look fairly normal. There are no ads; no hyperlinks; no common themes being pushed. But there are hundreds of them, all sporting 100% stolen content, and when they de-cloak sometime in the future they are going to be firmly entrenched inside Google's sandbox. Patty is hoping that this sneak attack is going to make her very rich.

And there's more...
As I mentioned, this is just a small sampling of the players. There are a lot more out there. However, the list should give you a bit of a feel for what the common tricks are, and why sploggers are bothering to play this game at all.