Splogs. They’re invading the net and clogging up blog search engines. Doesn’t look like we’ll be getting rid of them any time soon either. But what the heck are splogs anyways?

Spam blogs, or splogs, are fake blogs that links to affiliated websites. Just like email spam, splogs are created to grab search engine attention thus promoting the affiliated sites (which are often porn or gambling related).

Say you’re looking to buy a new car. You go to Technorati.com and search for that car to see what bloggers are saying about it. When the results come back you can see a link that appears to be helpful and legit, with a bloggers name and everything. But when you click on the link you are brought to a website advertising cheap car tyres. Bummer.

What is so contentious about these fake blogs is the fact that they’re obviously polluting search engine results. Technorati, perhaps the most well-know blog search engine, suggests that of the 35 million blogs it tracks, about nine percent are splogs. Out of that massive number, one in every five blog posts the search engine indexes is indeed fake.

Splogs are difficult to battle due to the way search engines work. While regular web search engines rank results based on relevance, blog search engines results are ranked by most recent postings. If there’s a spam attack on a certain topic on a given day, it will rank near the top of search results.

The situation is getting so extreme that splogs are scaring people away from using even using blogs as sources of information. Like email spam, the splog battle will probably never be completely eliminated. All search engines can really do is work to suppress splogs so they don’t completely ruin the online experience.