The GoogleBurner deal, at this point is still a diapered rumor, first appearing late last week.

As Doug Caverly reported, the announcement has supposedly been delayed due to the trouble the Mountain View giant has encountered trying to close the DoubleClick buy.

Though it’s still (presumably solid) rumor, search engine optimization experts are already contemplating what a FeedBurner acquisition would mean to their business.

Though it would further entrench Google in the RSS realm, the relationship could increase relevancy and give Google’s magic algorithm a better feel for blog authority.

Technorati’s been the blog search engine mainstay for most of us, consistently offering better results and a better interface than the others. FeedBurner could only help Google Blog Search establish a lasting presence.

SEO Book’s Aaron Wall explains why:

Few people subscribe to or link at a fake blog or unoriginal blog. Owning the leading reader, the leading feed provider, the leading analytics product, and the leading ad platform should give them a pretty good idea of what is real.

And suddenly splogs become a lot easier to combat. Thousands of made-for-AdSense and bogus blogs are set up daily to glean all the click-pennies the Web has to offer.

But subscriber information gives Google a clearer picture of what’s true and what’s not.

Not everyone’s convinced that it’ll be the splog-fighter it could be touted as.

Critics note that as soon as word gets out that Google is using FeedBurner to influence search results, a whole new spam is likely to emerge.

Google Whispers More Details About PPA

Since last week’s announcement that Google would start offering AdWords PPA ads, where the advertiser pays only when a predetermined conversion has taken place, plenty of buzz has swirled around the plan.

A lot of that buzz has focused on a few distinct questions about PPA on AdWords. The Inside AdWords team at Google posted answers to some of the more frequently asked questions they have received about the plan.

International advertisers will have to wait to participate, as Google has opened this limited test only to US-based clients. Advertisers must have a billing address in the United States, so even if an international business focuses on US customers, that isn’t enough to be eligible yet.

PPA ads only show up through being displayed on sites that participate in Google’s content network. They won’t appear on Google or in its search network.

An advertiser concern of content networks has been the prospect of being displayed on less than desirable partner sites. Since the condition of PPA requires some kind of conversion to take place, typical worries about click fraud with pay per click ads should not be a problem.

On the content network side, AdSense members can sign up for a referrals program. Search marketers managing clients through the AdWords ‘My Client Center’ product can select individual accounts to participate in the PPA beta.

The fixed rate provision of PPA through the new program probably won’t change in the near term. Some advertisers had asked about paying the PPA as a percentage of a sale, but Google is only doing the beta with a fixed price as the cost of conversion.

Got a tip that’s too hot for the comments section? Email me, dutter at webpronews dot com.

The owner of the Dallas Mavericks was gracious enough to take a few minutes today to touch base with me about how IceRocket deals with BlogSpot. I had observed in an article last week that Cuban’s blog search had banned BlogSpot blogs.

Cuban said today that isn’t the case. “We don’t filter out ALL BlogSpot blogs. We spend a lot of time scrubbing, we even added human intervention to try to make sure good BlogSpot blogs stay. And of course if we miss one, people let us know and we add it back.”

He noted that in a given month, IceRocket filters over a million splogs. “Sad thing now, is that although in absolute numbers BlogSpot hasn’t declined, there are so many new free host sites popping up that are nothing but splogs, as a [percentage] BlogSpot is declining.”

I was surprised to find IceRocket had made people part of the editing process, instead of relying wholly on technology. While Cuban would not get into specifics on the human facet of the splog fight (“Can’t give our secrets away,” he said), he did provide some enlightenment on how IceRocket conducts its fight against splogs:

Cuban sees splogs as such a problem for search engines that he disputes just how many truly fill an index. “Some other search sites are saying that 8 [percent] of their new blogs are splogs; then they are missing MILLIONS of them.”

He closed with an observation on a good way to figure out how many splogs are in a given search index: “Do a search on a word like casino. Since casinos pay a lot for referrals, that’s a good indication of the level of splogs in an index.”

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splog

According to media reports Google has taken measures to impede those attempting to use its Blogger service to create and maintain fake blogs. http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2005/10/24/google_trying_captcha_to_obstruct_s ploggers/index.php

Blogger’s official corporate blog mentioned the “spamalanche” that has search engines, blog search engines and net advertisers in a tizzy. http://buzz.blogger.com/

They are now working together to eliminate the economic incentive for splogs by identifying them at their source – by domain – and not indexing them.

Can CAPTCHA Stop The Spamalanche?

The “CAPTCHA” test is a method by which automated programs that post or create blogs can be foiled–where the user is asked to type in a sequence of letters from a line that people can read, but computers can’t decipher.

Blogger is currently working on ways to reduce false positives and ensure that once a blog with word verification has been established as legitimate, the blogger will no longer need to solve the CAPTCHA.

Why Create Splogs In The First Place?

Splogs generally fall into one of two categories, notes Mediapost: Link farms, which pack hundreds or even thousands of blogs with gibberish or recycled content, and contain multiple links to a particular Web site, which allow them to game Google’s PageRank algorithm, creating artificially high organic search rankings; and spam blogs that simply recycle content with AdSense or other advertising on them in the hopes of making money from errant users clicking on the ads. http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid= 35418

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, writes Jim Hedger. http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2005/10/splogs-scraping-adsense-fraud.php

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.

Why Splogs Are Evil

An article in the Wall Street Journal notes that the splogs are a big source of frustration for several search-engine start-ups that focus on blog searches, such as IceRocket.com LLC, Technorati Inc. and Feedster Inc. http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB112968552226872712- h37m_YUT3BqCvLRfhl6rqzKObnE_20061019.html?mod=rss_free

Jim Hedger makes some excellent points about why splogs are a menace to genuine bloggers, notably that:

Splogs are content thieves and can cause honest webmasters to get caught up in technical and financial issues by losing search engine listings and advertising revenue

Splogs use up blogging resources, especially those of Blogger and Blogspot

Slogs clog up the search results with crappy and irrelevant sites.

Splogs devalue the legitimate uses of blogs as communications and marketing tools

Splogs might lead future blog readers or users away from the growing blogosphere.

Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek, a firm that monitors and searches blog content, said that spam blogs make it harder to convince companies to blog. http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid= 35418

What Can You Do About Splogs?

It!/s not just the engines that are fighting back. There are a few knights in shining armour out there, like Frank Gruber, a blogger in Chicago who became frustrated while encountering splogs in search engines, and recently launched a site called SplogReporter, reports the Wall Street Journal. http://www.splogreporter.com

SplogReporter lets anyone submit the Web address of a suspected splog. Gruber has created an index to rate how “spammy” a blog is, and is building a database of splogs that he may share with search engines.

Google engineer, Matt Cutts, provided tips on how to report spam to Google on his blog. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/update-jagger-contacting-google/ Use his tips to report spam and do your bit to clean up the blogosphere.

I first wrote about spam-blogs here, and recommended that instead of using blogs for spam, marketers must focus on building content-rich sites and getting high-value links to them. http://www.blog-maniac.com/spam-blogging.htm

Don’t restrict yourself to just the SEO benefits of blogging. Appreciate the value that blogs can add to your marketing and public relations strategy and use them the way they were meant to be used – as cutting-edge and “cool” tools for communicating with your target audience.

(CC) Creative Commons License

Priya Shah is a partner in the search engine marketing firm, SEO & More http://www.seoandmore.com Request the whitepaper Boost Your Search Engine Visibility With Blogs And RSS http://www.seoandmore.com/blogs-rss/

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 , 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 , Google’s spam fighter and quality assurance czar , 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 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. (Please see today’s Major Players section for more information on the Jagger Update.)

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 , 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 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.

Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel – 250-385-1190 Toll Free – 877-385-5526 Fax – 250-385-1198

After 60% of blogspot blogs were found to be splogs and spoiling the entire Next Blog experience, Google’s “Flag As Objectionable” feature became a fierce weapon of the blogopolitan to get splogs de-listed from the blogosphere. (I think that’s the largest number of made-up words I’ve ever used in a sentence.)

At Haughey’s blog, A Whole Lotta Nothing, he suggests that everyone combine their flagging efforts for one day in an effort of anti-splog solidarity. Blogger Buzz picked up on the concept and endorsed it as a way of “rooting them out and bringing them to a desperate and violent end.”

“I bet a movement of bloggers flagging obvious abuses at blogspot would work just like a clean up your local park’ day might.”

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? See you Saturday in the blogosphere for some sharp shooting (click).