We’ve been reading about splogs and link farms while traveling this past weekend. Splogs are spam blogs, nonsensical, robot-generated blogs that can scam search engine algorithms into highly placed results. Link farms refers to the giant universes of splogs that cross-link and, in so doing, convince the search engines that they are important, much-linked sites.

Splogs are a constant vexation for sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Technorati, and a continuous arms race exists between their programmers and the sploggers. The incentive for the sploggers is money from click-through ads. When unsuspecting humans land on the splogs, often the only comprehensible content is the Ad Sense or other ads on the site.

Since the user was, after, looking for related content, they sometimes click on these ad links. They do this rarely, but often enough that sploggers, with huge numbers of big- and well-linked splogs and link farms, can make serious money (a la email spammers). One splogger, a recent CS graduate, gave a presentation suggesting that he had made $71,000 in 3 months from a monster splog and link farm. So, yet more unintended consequences, and yet another crop of humans that will trash a very fine human construct for a fast buck. Some day the Golden Goose will roll over and die, crushed under the weight of spam and other crap…?

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