08 February 2007

SPLOG Network Uncovered

Last month, I wrote a blog post on my Texas RV Travel blog about the new Airstream and Ford Concept Car. Airstream is an RV manufacturer and I thought the vehicle might be of interest to my readers.

A few days later, I received an invitation by email to join ford-bloggers.com. Wary of being tangled up in another flog episode, I sent a reply by email requesting more information. Specifically, I wanted to know who was the sponsor of this Ford-blogger.com site and if there was corporate involvement. I was never contacted again.

Now I was curious! I wanted to know if this Ford-blogger.com was a public relations or advertising agency FLOG or a content-rich niche SPLOG? What can I say? I love puzzles.
  • First, I went to Who-is to look up the owner of the domain. Of course, it was registered at Go Daddy, so there was no information except the site was registered last year for one year.

  • Next, I searched for Craig Cantin, the name used on the email invitation. I found a Craig Cantin of green-bloggers.com, but no more information.

  • Third, I searched for a text string used in the invitation: "and make a positive contribution to the Internet community. Would you be interested in joining"

  • So far, I have discovered apple-computer-bloggers, christian-bloggers, american-idol-bloggers, green-bloggers, honda-bloggers, and ferrari-bloggers.
It is a SPLOG network!! These websites are article farms, supported by Google Adsense. This is in violation of Google TOS, but their robot has not exposed this extensive SPLOG network. I grew weary of the deception, so I stopped.

Below is the email invitation I received. I put ______ (fill-in-the-blank) where the name of the blog changes. If you receive an email like the one below, it is a scam. Do not fall for it and link your blog to any of these splogs.
Dear blog author:

We recently came across your site, _______ while searching for bloggers who blog about _______ issues.

A small group of us have started a new site called _______ Bloggers . Our intent is to bring _______ bloggers closer together, and make a positive contribution to the Internet community.

Would you be interested in joining _______ Bloggers ? Please take a few minutes to have a look at what we are trying to do, and if you are interested, there is a sign up page to get the ball rolling. We would greatly appreciate your support in this endeavour.

If you do not feel that your blog would be a good fit for _______ Bloggers , but enjoy this subject area, come visit us and one of our member bloggers. You can also check our FAQ Section to learn more about _______ Bloggers .

We look forward to hearing from you and seeing you on _______ Bloggers .

Craig Cantin

_______ Bloggers

info@_______-bloggers.com

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well spotted and thank you for the warning

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