Splog Expansion

Until now, every splog I came across were of english language. Today was first time I came across some non-english language splogs. I saw a Brazillian porn splog for the first time as well as some spanish language splogs. It was somewhat confusing at first because it was almost automatic for me to skip over all non-english blogs during my visual examination. Although it's not a big surprise but it appears splogs have finally gone international.

On a related note Russia has eclipsed UK and is now a distant second in source of splog while US still holds the lead on number of splogs being produced by wide margin. As an example, splog such as this one has image links pointing to a .ru domain with a unique identifier just like your typical email spam. As expected the traditional email spammers have caught onto the new blog spam as just an alternate medium to spread their junk. I expect to see lot more nasty stuff in the near future as web pages provide vastly more possibilities for abuse. I'll write more extensively about what may be ahead of us on another post.

Yet another trend I'm starting to see is spammers are starting to spread their splogs to other blog providers. For example these two splogs and many more were created by one spammer:

http://translationservices4u.blogspot.com/
http://sm-select1-1.blogspot.com/

The reason why I know this is because on translationservices4u.blogspot.com splog, there are links like this to splogs hosted on msn spaces:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/sm-select-6/
http://spaces.msn.com/members/sm-select-44/
http://spaces.msn.com/members/sm-select-91/
http://spaces.msn.com/members/sm-select-92/

He started out on blogspot but now he has created splogs on msn spaces and he is cross linking them.

There are other examples of this across other blog service provider. This particular splog exists on blogspot:

http://healthychineserecipe.blogspot.com/

This splog has links to typepad:

http://dreamretirement.typepad.com/save_money_on_gas/
http://dreamretirement.typepad.com/healthy_eating/

Perhaps I wasn't paying close attention to this but this is pretty new to me. It appears spammers are starting to diversify their spamming activities across multiple blog providers. The optimistic part of me is thinking perhaps this is a sign that they are starting to feel the squeeze by Blogger and they decided to move elsewhere. But then I'm guessing this is somehow a better means to trick Google to rank these pages higher since links are going to and coming from a different domain.

Clearly the splog problem is evolving beyond the scope of one organization's control. Some level of cooperation and communication between everyone in blogosphere is required to combat this problem effectively. I'm still quite cynical on this. I just have hard time imagining Google and Microsoft openly sharing information to address this problem to their mutual benefit.

Update: Here is a spammer who created five splogs. Do you know what language it is in? I didn't either but after little bit of digging I figured it out. I'll post the answer tommorow.

Update: Those five splogs originated from Prague, Czech Republic.