Spotting Splogs on Digg

Blogger and all-around stand-up guy Niall Kennedy has posted a great piece of investigative journalism on his eponymous blog.

He clicked on one of Digg's top stories last week. It was a post offering tips to help geeks get into shape, and the link led to a blog that Niall had never seen before:

The 13 sure-fire tips were authored by "Dental Geek" and posted to the "Discount Dental Plan" category on his WordPress blog. Scanning the sidebar links and adjacent content it was obvious this content was out of place on a page optimized for dental insurance. The webmaster of i-dentalresources.com had inserted some Digg bait, seeded a few social bookmarking services, and waited for links and page views to roll in, creating a new node in a spam farm fueled by high-paying affiliate programs and identity collection for resale.

He traced the site's owner to an overseas address, then uncovered links to an SEO services company that even offers a content generation service for spammers hoping to drive traffic. He found the company was selling "six blog posts a month for $75 optimized for specific keywords, including guarantees for blog directory and ping submissions."

Of course, this isn't anything new, but the fact that a post generated by hucksters made it onto the front door of Digg is certain to raise some eyebrows. Niall's post continues on to show you how it's done. I'd recommend reading the whole thing.