One of the great things about a blog is that it's a living document. Bloggers write a journal about what matters to them, and readers with similar interests respond. But what if someone who doesn't care at all about what you have to say, co-opts your blog site, and uses it for advertising or malicious activity?

How can this happen? The attacker, or splogger, uses automated tools to manipulate a blogger service to create thousands of fake blogs. The sploggers load these phony blogs with links to specific Web sites, like home mortgage, poker, and tobacco sites. By fooling the search-engine spiders that crawl the Web looking for commonly linked-to destinations, the sploggers manipulate search results, and boost traffic to their ads through the fake blog sites. And all those sites look like yours.

But there are ways to find out if you're being splogged and steps you can take.

Be proactive

Splogs and abused page rankings waste Internet users' time by directing them to web pages that have nothing to do with the words they're searching for. Sploggers make accessing information more difficult, saturate the hosting platforms, and discredit blogs.

What's worse, these fake blogs, created by unscrupulous authors, can contain links contaminated by spyware, Trojans, or even viruses. The risk of coming across an infected blog is still minimal, but there have already been reports of emails inviting the reader to click on a link to an infected blog.

If you have your own blog, subscribe to news feeds at search engines like Technorati, IceRocket, and PubSub that are designed to track blogs, Most bloggers use these services to track what other blogs say about them, but the search engine will also detect splogs lifting your content. Type in search terms that are similar to your name, your site's name, or your site's URL. You'll recognize a splog by the unusual number of buzzwords in the main content area. And splogs often redirect visitors to an entirely different site.
If you use the Internet, make sure you have installed a reliable firewall and anti-virus tool to protect your data from hackers, viruses, worms, and Trojan horses.
Internet users should be just as vigilant as they are about emails and all web sites in general. Don't click suspicious links or objects, and make sure to update your anti-virus and other software.

Be a good blog citizen

While splogs may seem like a minor annoyance to the individual blogger, the overall effect of splogs is far-reaching. What happens when all the search terms become infested with these splogs? It makes it that much harder to find the stuff you really want to look for. So for the blog and Internet community's sake, when you notice a splog—report it.

On some blogging sites, there is a flag or button you can click to report a splog for objectionable content. Blogger administrators will then investigate the site.
If there is no button, flag, or link, you may have to contact the blog host directly.
You could report the splog to the new, grass-roots service Splog Reporter. Splog Reporter relies on a special splog-identification system that analyzes a blog's URL for suspicious keywords and punctuation like hyphens --. For some reason, most splogs are hyphenated. Splog Reporter adds suspect sites to its database, alerting search engines to remove them from their indexes.
If the splog has Google ads on it, the site can be reported to Google's AdSense program, and the account could be revoked.

One of the best ways to fight splogs is to be vocal about them. Demand accountability and diligence from hosting providers, and demand additional barriers in the blog-creation process. In addition to speaking out, security software like Norton Internet Security from Symantec can help protect your identity and guard against destructive viruses, worms, and Trojan horses.

Conclusion

Right now, splogs are more annoying than dangerous, but sploggers are getting more sophisticated and malicious. Whether you have your own blog site, read blogs, or just use the Internet, take the simple precautions outlined in this article to access the Internet freely, and secure your computer. Be sure to visit ClubSymantec and Symantec Security Response regularly to get the latest Internet security information.