A Spam Blog (known as a Splog in the jargon) is a website or blog created exclusively to peddle links to some other website, which may be fake or otherwise misleading. Spam blogs can generally be spotted easily as they:
- Have little or no local relevance / connection with East Lothian, Scotland, the UK
- Will mostly likely contain a sprinkling of links to less than ethical websites that will make money out of you clicking through the links
- Often contain very badly written content, which is only vaguely plausible in the context, that may have been machine generated or contain nonsense text
- Employ poor use of English or display content copied from elsewhere, repetitive or duplicated
- Won’t contain the other pages that make a legitimate website plausible, such as author information, contact information and a clear exposition of what the website is about etc.
Such blogs are also used to trick search engines to achieve a higher ranking for the target sites linked and possibly to attract a few clicks and advert revenue.
We act severely on blogs that display any of these characteristics. We don’t want irrelevant material polluting our news feeds. Also, search engines are getting better all the time at identifying such bad blogs and we really do not want our platform to wrongly flagged as a source of SPAM.
As a website owner avoid using trickery to cajole or dupe the search engines, confuse users with excessive use of categories and tags, borrow or steal duplicated text from another site even if it is your own, make sure all the other pages are well crafted and up to date.
If we believe that your website is SPAM, we will mark it as such. Owners will need to ask us to manually review their site.
