Today I read an article about Splogs by Jim Hedger of StepForth Placement Inc., which prompted me to pen this article so I imagine the credit for its conception, should go to him.

Splogs are websites that are principally conceived and built for the purpose of 'earning' (and I use the term loosely) revenue through such programs as Google Adsense. These websites do not exist to sell anything, instruct in any way or even to inform, although they probably do in some instances because of the amount of information they contain. They are simply websites with no purpose or value in real terms except for the amount of information about a specific subject, which is found to be in many cases, stolen from other websites. The content is stolen either manually or by using 'bots'. The latter method makes it possible to produce hundreds of pages of content with little effort.

As a result, Jim points out, millions of these Splogs have appeared over a relatively short time.

Jim's article talks about how the theft of this information can sometimes adversely affect the owners of the stolen material and other websites who have reprinted it with permission. My intention is not to repeat Jims article, so you can read about these aspects yourself at: Splogs + Scraping + AdSense = Fraud.

To my surprise and a little anger, it turns out that many of these websites are created using the free hosting and free blog software offered by most of the major search engines!

I've always advised, in person, when contacted by email and in my writings that first thing ANY serious home business or online businessperson should do is GET A DOMAIN and HOSTING. These can be found for as little as $4-95 per year (domain) and $1-99 per month (hosting), with more facilities than your average Newbie could want. These figures are hardly 'bank-breakers', in fact, if a budding home business person doesn't have the $10-91 (or even less) that it would cost to get started for a quarterly period, they obviously have other, more important things they should consider using that money on.

I may be criticized for this remark however, in my opinion, I believe the free website and blogging services supplied by any entity should be reserved only for 'Personal' websites, like those which families or individuals use to post about their hobbies, likes, loves and interests. They shouldn't be available for any online 'business' purpose at all. That, of course, would include banning Adsense and such programs from being added to them. I actually imagine that's what they were probably initially intended for anyway.

Anyone who has a serious desire to earn income of any description through the Internet should be doing so from his or her own bonafide domain. I acknowledge that I have no right to declare what should and should not be contained in other's websites however, when the propensity is there for harm to be done to other websites and their owners through theft, I will have my say.

Needless to say, as the subject of these 'Splogs' has become 'hot' recently and obviously, reports of webmasters being adversely affected have been made, Google has actually gone so far as to ask website owners to report sites, which appear to be 'Splogs'. This is definitely a move in the right direction, in so far as something is being done at least to discourage the practice and root out this type of website.

With Google indexing something like 34 billion websites, there is a lot of rubbish around and much of it is making the Search Engine results a bit of a mess. These days, when simply entering an everyday keyword or phrase for search, I generally find that half of the top ten results are rubbish, rather than good examples of the kind of website I would like to find.

The practice of 'Splogging' for Adsense and similar programs is, in itself, a bastardization of home business but to achieve it through theft of other's content and to present it using free facilities is really another of those nasty practices we really don't need on the Internet.