First, some people may be asking "what is a 'splog'?" The word comes from the combination of "spam" and "blog" and its usually a completely useless blog site with no real content (either randomly generated crap or nothing but "borrowed" content) that exists for no other reason than to try to trick the search engines in an underhanded link building scheme or is actually trying to capture search traffic in the hopes that people will arrive, realize the site is worthless, but will choose to click an ad link to leave instead of hitting their back button.

If you have a blog, you may find that you see "pingbacks" coming from sites that are reposting your content and then linking back to you. If these sites are running Google AdSense ads, there are a couple of ways to fight back.

Under one of their Google ad blocks, click on "Ads By Google". That will take you to a page with information about Google's advertising services. At the bottom of that page, you'll see a link with the words: "Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw". Click it.

It asks two questions about how relevant the ads were and how useful the site was, then has another link: "Also report a violation?" When you select that the issues were with the web site, they offer you a few bad things the site might be doing. Now "The site is hosting/distributing my copyrighted content" might seem to be the way to go. But if you check that, Google will send you instructions on how to snail mail or fax a DMCA violation notice (they will not accept e-mailed ones). It's a lot of work.

What may be more effective is to select "The site violates AdSense policies in other ways" which gives you a small text box in which to describe the violation. If you click the "AdSense policies" link, you'll go to their policies page. About halfway down that page, they state: "AdSense publishers are required to adhere to the webmaster quality guidelines posted at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html."

Near the bottom of the quality guidelines page, they state: "Avoid 'doorway' pages created just for search engines, or other 'cookie cutter' approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content." And when you follow that "little or no original content" link, you find a page stating...

Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other auto-generated pages that don't add any value to users.

I just report the violation as "Violates Webmaster Quality Guidelines by using scraped content and provides little or no original content."

It's a lot faster than the many hoops they make you jump through for a copyright violation notice and I know Google takes complaints seriously as I got busted once for a content-related policy violation on another now-defunct site.

If you have the time and desire to fax over a copyright violation notice, don't bother reporting it through the feedback mechanism as they'll just send you the instructions you can find here on their AdSense & the DMCA page. But if you're planning to go this route, make yourself a boilerplate notice and put them on speed dial, because you could be filing a lot of DMCA notices.

Another way is to check the splog's WhoIs information for their domain. This is contact information and some technical information related to their domain (Yahoo's "domain" is yahoo.com). ICANN rules state that providing false or materially incomplete contact information can be grounds for having your domain registration suspended or even cancelled. So if they're giving obviously false contact information (like a 555 phone number), submit an ICANN complaint. A friend of mine had some issues with WhoIs data problems and it temporarily shut down his business.

So if you're fed up with spammers filling their bogus blogs with your content, hopefully these hints will help you toss a little cherry bomb in their trash can. Good luck and God Bless.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 2:32 am and is filed under Answers, Online Marketing And SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.