Hi Kenneth,
Thanks for another great, informational update. I did want to mention that although we as bloggers don't experience spam, the search engines have to watch out for spam in the form of splogs (spam + blogs = splogs).
The reason this is a problem is that while legitimate marketers like you, me and others here at AdLand use blogs to announce and promote legitimate information, sploggers are out there stealing and aggregating our content with automated tools, republishing to gain high rankings and "game" google for AdSense revenues on their fake blogs.
Here is the definition of a splog from Wikipedia.com:
Splog
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are Web Log (or "blog") sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites with an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless Web sites.
Splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google's Blogspot service. These fake blogs waste valuable disk space, bandwidth, and pollute search engine results.
The term splog was popularized around mid August 2005 when it was first used by Mark Cuban, but appears to have been used a few times before for describing spam blogs going back to at least 2003.
Several splog reporting services have been created for good willed users to report splog with plans of offering these splog URLs to search engines so that they can be excluded from search results. Splog Reporter was the first service of this kind.
There is frequent confusion between the terms "Splog" and "Link spam". "Splogs" are blogs where actual articles are spam, whereas "Link Spam" refers to only spam in the comments of a blog article. "Splog" does not include random comments on the blogs of innocent bystanders, that is "Link spam" or "comment spam". "Link spam" takes advantage of a site's ability to allow visitors to post links. A blog that posts its own spam is a form of Spamdexing that is now called a Splog.
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