In previous post about spam blogs, I have explained briefly how different types of spam blogs and sites were built. Nowadays, content are every where. Many articles are available for reprint for free because the author want extra publicity. Collecting hundreds of industry related articles in one site or blog arguably can bring some value to the visitor but what if there are 1,000s of such sites?

I always advocate reprint articles and other materials as supportive content. They can add value to the blog, but only if enough original content exists. Blog readers come back and subscribe to your blog feed because they want to read more about what you write.

For the long haul, only blogs with original content will survive because those are the only things that separate them from the crowd.

Why spam blogs can be such a problem to us? Why can’t we just ignore them? Couldn’t just Google, Yahoo! and MSN drop them from the index?

The core of the problem is not that simple, because splogs use almost all tactics and advanced features available to weblog software. This post tries different approach to explain various aspects of spam blogs by actually answering questions about them.

1. How do sploggers use different aspects of blogs to spam the search engines?
a. They use the one click publishing feature of a blog to easily fill the blog with lots of content. Yes, they don’t even have to learn how to design and put up HTML pages.

b. Blog templates can be modified to have good on-page optimization. Not to mention the built-in internal linking feature. No maintenance whatsoever is needed. A blog runs by itself, hands-free.

c. Sploggers used to take advantage of blog technology to get their site (most of the time spam sites) found by search engine spiders. They filled the blogs with random content and deep linked to their web pages. But now, a blog can be used as the main sites itself.

d. Irresponsible publishers exploit other people’s blog commenting system to link to their sites/ blogs.

e. Sudden appearance of new sites with thousands of new content pages trigger penalty from search engines and blog directories. Sploggers use the internal scheduling feature of the weblog software to post at random time and different time interval.

2. Where do splogs get their content from?
In previous post, I’ve already blogged about some different ways to fill splogs with content, such as article directories, search engines, public domain content, other people’s RSS feeds, etc.

Splogs attempt to get loads of content as fast as they can automatically. Searchable article directories are perfect. With highly definable format, they can be scraped in seconds. RSS feed syndication scripts are available for free. Search engine results usually return keyword rich content.

3. How do sploggers keep their blog fresh?
By using the scheduling feature of the blog software, or using an automatic desktop application. If they also syndicate other people’s webfeed, then the page automatically refresh each time there are new content available.

Used carefully, sploggers really can build content rich blogs without much effort on their part. It’s really not that hard, and involve an investment of less than $200, or free if you are willing to do more work.

The question is, if they can create a site with real content (articles, etc.), what distinguish them from other hand-made blogs?

I’ll try to answer this tomorrow.