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Splogs + Scraping + AdSense = Fraud
By Jim Hedger, StepForth Placement Inc. (c) 2005

The other day, an article
(http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=2338) 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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splog), 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 (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/), Google's spam
fighter and quality assurance czar
(http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051010-150553),
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
(http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/update-jagger-contacting-google/)
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.

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
(http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=2330), 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 (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/update-jagger-contacting-google/)
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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Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing
expert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time for
StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine
Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes
the opportunity to share his experience through interviews,
articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at
"jimhedger@stepforth.com"
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