You’re absolutely right. I trimmed that part of the blog post because I think it’s a whole other issue. But yes, splogs seem fairly savvy in that regard. They’re linking to Wikipedia and other reputable sites which may or may not be participating in a link purchase. It’s genius really. Not only does it boost trust and authority for the splog, but it casts doubt on the status of those links.

At a glance, you can’t know whether that specific site paid for that link or whether the splog is using it to create both build trust and create uncertainty. But with 50% of those splogs out of the index it would seem that Google has determined that they’re trafficking in paid links or engaging in some other practice outside of the guidelines.

I’d like to think none of the links are paid and that these splogs are simply manipulating trust and authority to drive traffic to a network of AdSense-laden sites. But my gut tells me otherwise.

One of the problems is that sites receiving these links don’t currently have an incentive to disavow that link, nor a method to do so. I’m been tossing some ideas around in ways that sites could curate their backlinks, and that such curation would be a positive signal within search algorithms.

Would you be willing to, at a minimum, mark certain backlinks as spam within, say, Google Webmaster Tools?

How to kill it? That’s the $64,000 question. I believe there are a lot of ways we could curb it. At the heart of the matter is the need to identify the practice, trace it back to those participating in it, and penalizing them … quickly. The latter will likely lead to a collateral damage. At this point I think I may be willing to accept that.

Oh, yes, article spinning software. (The search result for article spinner is pretty revealing.) That’s another cottage industry that, as you mention, is cheap and sadly, still seems to be effective to some degree.