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Splogs + Scraping + AdSense = Fraud
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
October 19 2005
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The other day, an article appeared in Search Engine Journal suggesting
webmasters monetize their sites using Google AdSense. While the article
neglected to mention an alternative webmaster advertising program offered
by Yahoo Search Marketing, the idea of using one’s website as a
commercial medium (if possible or practical) makes good sense and can
provide a minor side-income. Such minor side-incomes are often the
first ingredients in making the gravy craved by all small business owners.
Since the advent of Google’s AdWords grassroots distribution program,
AdSense, several webmasters have built businesses out of taking content
off of other people’s websites and using that content to build pages
designed specifically to attract ad-clicks. As the average commission earned
by sites running AdSense generated advertising is approximately $20/month,
webmasters working this type of scheme need to create hundreds, if not thousands
of pages to make a living. In order to create those pages and attract ad-clicking
visitors, content must be created, begged, borrowed, or most commonly, simply
stolen. Known as Splogs, these sites only exist to game Google in one way
or another, mostly for money but also for increased search rankings or as
a means of manipulating search spiders.
Splogs most often get their content by scraping, the process of sending
an electronic copying bot to take everything it sees, recreating it on an
unlimited number of instant documents. By running advertising generated
through the AdSense program, the owners of the splogs make money when visitors
click on the ads. In other words, literally millions of instant sites have
sprung up over the past twelve months, most of which are free-hosted Blogs,
containing content scraped out from the original sites.
Before continuing, I would like to make it clear that there are several
publications that request permission to reprint content. That’s ok.
Chances are, this article is being read in one of those publications. Online
business runs on such agreements.
Splogs are bad business and the practice is finally getting the notice
it deserves. Several search heavyweights have weighed in on Splogs over
the past two weeks and a flame-war (the virtual equivalent of fisticuffs)
broke out between members of two well-known SEO/SEM forums. As a result,
the practice of producing AdSense revenues from stolen content on spammy
sites got a little bit harder, starting today.
Matt Cutts, Google’s spam
fighter and quality assurance czar, has
taken an obvious and positive interest in Splogs. In the SEO/SEM community,
Cutts’ name is as widely known as Page, Brin, and even Gates’ names
are. Cutts is “the man” when it comes to explaining the state
of Google’s various indexes and how they work. He is referred to as
the Chief Spam Fighter at Google. In a posting to his Gagets,
Google, and SEO blog earlier today, Cutts invites Google users to report Splogs displaying
AdSense driven advertising.
“You see a low-quality site that is running AdSense
If you run across a site that you consider spammy and it has AdSense
on it, click on the “Ads by Goooooogle” link and click “Send
Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw”. Enter the words spamreport
and jagger1 in the comments field.”
The name, “Jagger1” is the reference name given the Google
algorithm update that is currently causing the present shuffling of Google’s
search results. (Please see today’s Major Players section for more
information on the Jagger Update.)
Splog fraud is a big problem for Google and a growing concern for the other
major search advertising providers such as Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN.
It is also a problem for others working on the Internet. The way content
is taken from one site and replicated to dozens of others can cause no end
to technical and financial issues for honest webmasters. Content, incidentally,
is not always limited to what the viewer sees on the screen. Stolen content
often includes source-code and as anyone familiar with code can tell you,
there’s a lot of domain and document specific information embedded
in source-code.
Over at Search
Engine Journal, a funny posting shows how one poorly executed
scrape made an honest webmaster afraid of being branded a click-fraud artist
by Google. After scraping the site, the splog-artist apparently forgot to
remove the AdSense code from the stolen content. That’s how the honest
webmaster found out he had been stolen from. He was moved to contact Google
before his AdSense account status was affected. If the webmaster hadn’t
been paying attention, he might have been badly branded by Google, burned
by someone else’s scam.
That’s not the only way that scrappers could adversely affect honest
webmasters however. The content webmasters create, or have created for them,
is the attraction that prompts visitors to their sites. Attracting lots
of site visitors is a pretty important step to making money from AdSense
or the Yahoo Publishing Network. If someone is stealing that content, they
are also stealing potential visitors. For the webmaster, that content represents
investment. For the content creator, it represents product. Either way,
the scraping of content is theft.
The stolen product is then used to create what is essentially duplicate
content on another site. Duplication of content can have an adverse effect
on the search engine placement of all documents containing the similar items.
Imagine losing your placements because someone else took the material you
laboured over. Fortunately, Google’s historic record of documents
is fairly good at weeding through which source first displayed specific
content.
Search engines have several other reasons to be concerned about splogs.
As many of them are created using the free-blog software offered and hosted
by most of the major search engines, the proliferation of so many splogs
consumes a lot of resources. They also gum up search results with sites
not actually relevant to search engine users. Lastly, they devalue the legitimate
uses of blogs as communications and marketing tools, which might lead future
blog readers or users away from the growing blogosphere. Citizen’s
publishing is seen as a major revenue source for both Google and Yahoo.
Having invested so much time, energy and money into the establishment of
blogs, the major search engines would be loath to let their investments
go the way of the dodos without a fight.
Now that the web development community is talking about the issue in earnest,
some forms of protections might evolve. As it stands currently, there is
little a webmaster can do to protect his or her content from being stolen
for profit. You can use Copyscape to see if your material has been nabbed
but after doing that, there is little one can do except write angry letters
to the thief and a lawyer.
Google is inviting users and webmasters to report splogs running AdSense
whenever they are seen. In a just universe, not only would the AdSense accounts
of those scrappers be closed, their bank accounts would be emptied after
Google sues them for fraud.
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