What is a Splog or Spam Website?

The term “splog” is a derogatory one and is an acronym that stands for “Spam Blog.” A spam blog or website is one that has no useful or relevant content for visitors and is usually created in order to try and manipulate search engine results.

While there is no official definition of a splog, they usually have one or more of the following characteristics:

• Nonsense or meaningless content.
• Posts that are stuffed full of keywords.
• Either no information about the blog’s author or fake information.
• Articles that have been “spun.” Spinning software takes original content and replaces it with synonyms.
• Very poorly written content.
• Highly repetitive content.
• An excessive amount of advertisements.
• A very large number of links to other splogs.
• Stolen/plagarized content from another website.
• A very large number of affiliate links.
• Links to illegal, immoral, or unethical websites.

The primary purpose of creating a splog is to try and game search engine results. It used to be that if a blog used a certain keyword a number of times and had a lot of links to other websites, it would get a higher ranking from search engines. This, however, is no longer true as Google and other leading search engines have changed their algorithms to reduce the rankings for splogs.

Although search engines are getting better at weeding out splogs, some legitimate websites may inadvertently become identified as a splog. If you find that your WordPress site has suddenly been down ranked by a search engine, be sure to check with the search engine company and find out if your site has been mistakenly identified as a splog. Google and other search engine companies have a procedure to follow to get your website reclassified as legitimate.