This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. (September 2014) |
Spam in blogs (also known as blog spam, comment spam, or social spam) is a form of spamdexing which utilizes internet sites that allow content to be publicly posted, in order to artificially inflate their website ranking by linking back (also referred to as backlinking) to their web pages. Backlinking helps search algorithms determine the popularity of a web page, which plays a major role for search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing to decide a web page ranking on a certain search query. This helps the spammer's website to list ahead of other sites for certain searches, which helps them to increase the number of visitors to their website.
It may be done by posting random comments on other blog websites (usually by an automated process), or by copying other websites' content and using it on free-to-use publishing services like Blogger and WordPress or publicly accessible wikis, digital guest books, and internet forums.
Note that blog spam also has another meaning, specifically when a blog author creates posts without adding any informational or educational value solely for publishing them on other websites