Someone Stop the Sploggers

The problem of splog (or splam blogs) seems to be getting worse instead of better. Opportunists are scraping content from multiple RSS feeds and combining them into faux blogs whose sole raison d'etre is to generate revenue from Google ads.

If you search for one of the blog engines (Feedster, Blogspot, Technorati, etc.) for the name of a blog, you'll find dozens to hundreds of websites generated by bots, and of course the blog writers see zero revenue from that. For an example of folks who are pilfering the MarketingShift feed, click here.

It's a serious problem that is costing advertisers money, and something has to be done about it. Feedster president Chris Redlitz says that its everyone's responsibility to put these clowns out of business -- the blog companies (Blogger et al) that allow the sites to be published, the companies that provide the ads (Google, Yahoo, etc.) and the search engines that generate the traffic.

"They muck up our index," says Redlitz, who says that Feedster is working on technical solution for cleaning out the splog.

RSS makes it easy to distribute content, and I'd hate it if publishers are forced to protect the feed subscription process by requiring registration to prevent bots from stealing content, but it may soon come to that. Splogging may be technically legal, but it's certainly not ethical and must be addressed.