According to Technorati, the largest of the blog search engines, they currently track 33.3 million blogs.
Just why are there so many blogs?
Firstly, there are the real genuine folks - the bone fide bloggers who love to share their thoughts and ideas on a regular basis with a wide range of interested readers. And good luck to them.
But there are also a number of problems with blogs leading to a massive glut of spam blogs - or "splogs" for short.
(1) Regular Updates
By definition a blog is updated regularly. A blog that is never updated defeats the object. However this can put pressure on the blogger to add useful, interesting, applicable posts frequently. Perhaps they don't have the time. Perhaps they don't have the inspiration. Perhaps they simply don't have enough to say.
Whatever the reason, the "regular updates" conundrum can lead to poorer quality posts over time, or less frequent posting, or the use of content from other authors.
(2) Search Engines Love Blogs
It has been suggested that blog stands for Better Listings On Google because typically blogs will rank well in the search engines, and are indexed both quickly and regularly.
This makes blogs a dream tool for marketers of all descriptions and leads to numerous blogs being created with the primary intention of being keyword-filled search engine food whose sole aim is to draw traffic that can then be turned into dollars.
Now even many of the largest bloggers will accept advertising to help pay for their hobby but when a blog is put up *just* to draw visitors, rather than to be interesting, again the quality and frequency of posts can drop rapidly.
(3) Advertising Billboards
These two factors mean than many blogs soon become simply places for bloggers to paste dozens of adverts for products they can earn a commission from.
They provide little if any content, not even product reviews, just page after page of keyword-stuffed adverts.
Which defeats the object of a blog, and is also unlikely to keep visitors coming back for the latest updates.
So why are these problems? Well they reduce the overall quality of blogs on the Internet which isn't good for people like you and me looking for high quality information.
I can honestly say that 95%+ of the blogs I visit fall foul of at least one of these three problems, if not all of them and those that I would revisit I could count on the fingers of one hand.
It's also not good for the search engines whose business model depends on serving up accurate, useful information to us.
So they're fighting back.
Google is deleting huge numbers of splogs hosted on their Blogger service and many other blogs are vanishing from the listings.
If you try to blog without posting regular, useful, original content it's only a matter of time before you get caught.
So best to remedy your crimes *before* all your effort goes up in smoke at the next search engine update.
