Splogs are in the news this week. Marketers out to make a quick buck have discovered that splogs can quickly and easily be created through the use of scrapers. Add AdSense or YPN accounts to the mix and you've got a recipe for quick cash, and bad search results.

What's a splog you ask? Think spam...think blog. You've got a splog. Basically, these fake blogs are created in order to populate search engine results with blogs that exist solely to generate revenue through AdSense or YPN ads. Spammers set up dozens, or even hundreds of blogs and then use programs called scrapers to pull content from other sites to post on their own.

They work, so there's plenty of incentive for folks to create them. They also clutter up search results with junk sites, making them a serious problem for search engines.

For more on what splogs are and why they're causing problems, check out today's guest article: "Splogs + Scraping + AdSense = Fraud" by Jim Hedger.