Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Google Coming Heavily Upon Splogs

A spam blog (Splog) is a blog whose primary purpose is to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites or to earn revenue through links and advertisements, etc.

The purpose of a Splog can also be to increase the rank of a page in Google search engine or to help in appearance of products or services at various search engines like Yahoo and Bing. These Splogs typically overburden the blog hosting platforms and make them less productive and efficient.

These Splogs also clog the search engines results pushing back the genuine and productive results at back pages. Go to any major search engine and you would come across useless search results. Even results unrelated to search term are found on first page of major search engines.

Google has taken an initiative in this regard and lots of blogs are now blocked for violating its terms of service. It is using automated bots to search for Splogs and also using users’ inputs to detect and block Splogs. Users typically flag a blog as Splog and after some flaggings Google takes the necessary action.

This is a welcome step on the part of Google as it would result in an overall improvement in the users’ services. To make the situation even better, Google must also target search engine optimisation (SEO), especially Blackhat SEO techniques. These techniques are even worst than Splogs as they force unreliable and unproductive results at the very first page of any search engine.

Finally, Google’s bots and team are also protecting users’ accounts so that they can be prevented from being misused. Any unusual activity happening at a Google account is immediately noticed and the account is blocked to prevent its abuse.

In exceptional cases, this may cause some inconvenience to genuine Bloggers as well as their account may be accidentally blocked, though finally restored back. But this is the price that we must be willing to bear if we need good and effective web services. Google keep it up with your good work.