I wrote recently on how to develop your own blog to use for the benefit of your core website. The blog can assist in early Google indexing and link through to your web pages.

I was careful to mention that you should create informative articles on your blog, not merely generate worthless pages. This practice is a form of spam and over time will devalue blogs as a source of informative content, possibly leading to their exclusion from certain search engines or search results.

Whilst there is a positive business use to a blog there are also many negative uses and a splog is the worst form.

Some people generate a fake blog to hold content gathered from other sites via their RSS feeds (syndication of content) and use these postings to generate visitors. Vistors are converted into ‘stolen’ revenue through clicking on adverts delivered through the Google Adsense Program.

What can you do about it: -

1. don’t stray into this practice
2. don’t click on the adsense adverts if you stumble onto one of these sites
3. consider reporting the site to services such as Splogfighter. This is run by an anonymous American, was so incensed by this practice that he started a one-man war. He has been prompting Google to delete thousands of splogs a day from Blogspot.

The war is on.