ProBlogger links to this article in the Wall Street Journal on Splogs – a relatively new development in the continuing evolution of junk online content. The term Splog is a contraction of “Spam Blog.” Steve Rubel has also written about it.

For those of you that blog, you may have had your entries hijacked by random posts that have nothing to do with your blog but they encourage you to link to random sites. It’s all a shell game intended to move these junk sites up the page rankings on various search engines and, as a result, increase the “real estate” value of those sites as advertising locations.

It’s a nasty business but there are remedies that you can use to beat the spammers. Make sure that if you’re using an integrated comments system (like the kind you sign up for through Blogger), that you turn on the “Word Verification” feature. That feature requires you to re-type a six-letter code before your comments or links will be accepted. The spam-bots can’t handle it.

Interesting stuff.

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