The line that separates between a blog scam and legitimate blog model is often very thin.

In fact, some techniques used by blog scams take advantages of the benefits of blogging. The problem is, often they are used in ways that are destructive.

For example, “blog and ping” is a great tool to notify blog search engines about new entries or changes on your blog. Used properly, it tracks every single conversation that is currently happening on the blogosphere.

Aggressive blog and ping with spammy content turns the services into something less useful because of the volume of spam. It pollutes the blogosphere.

Some site generation tools claim to be legitimate and concentrate on building solid content based on sophisticated methods. Although the content generated are based on good information, still they lack personality and more or less repetition of the same content.

The content is good, but the auto-generation feature damages the quality. Who need repetitive information anyway?

Another technique utilizes mass submission tool for social bookmarking sites. This tool defeats the entire purpose of social bookmarking which is collection of really useful sites submitted and collected manually by human beings.

The technique that automate submission to social bookmarking sites to gain automatic inbound links is popularized with the term “tag and ping”.

More sophisticated methods involve auto RSS feeds to blog posting, datafeed tools that parse product information from affiliate merchants, blog comment spamming and auto-trackbacking, and others.

Splogs are typical blogs which consist of spammy content generated by one of more of the tools mentioned above.

Of course, there are huge differences between real blog with splogs but sometimes the line is so thin even some bloggers fail to realize what they use is actually cheesy.

Your mileage may vary, but with a basic understanding of what is a blog and how it works, you soon will realize that every tool that tries to automate things will either get you nowhere or even bring bad things to your business.

The last thing you want is to be banned by search engines, deleted from blog search engines or simply being avoided by readers, who are one of the most important currency for your blog.