I Am Not A Splog!

**Update, 9/21: The ad program wrote back with a very kind apology for characterizing my site as a splog...but they still denied me because (the best I can understand) most of my posts are just links. So, from now on, I'm going to work on bantering more. My apologies in advance. ;)

Yesterday I applied to an advertising program for blogs, and I was turned down because supposedly TipBlog.com is a "splog." I didn't even know what that meant, so I went to Wikipedia for the definition, and it says that splogs are:

"...weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are a type of scraper site, where content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites. These blogs contain an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites...Splogs are blogs where the articles are fake, and are only created for spamming."

First of all, to everyone who uses this site (and there are on average almost 300 of you per day, visiting two pages apiece on average), this is obviously not anywhere close to being true. Does this site contain some advertising? Of course. Don't most sites? That's not the complaint. TipBlog is NOT "nonsense," with "fake articles," and the links I share here are 99% not affiliated with me!

TipBlog grew out of a feature in my daily trivia newsletter I sent out through YahooGroups for two years, which my dear friend Ginger took over last year. I was spending so much time trying to find freebies and deals, and they weren't trivia-related in the first place, that it made sense to break that into its own separate website, and that's how TipBlog.com was born. I continue to spend at least one hour a day (sometimes upwards of two or three) scouring the internet for items to post here. I look through several deal boards and freebie sites and I almost always verify that the deal is still valid before I post it here. This is not random gibberish designed to increase page rank of associated sites -- I work hard to post here every day!

Further, I don't advertise, much less spam. I do have the link to this site (and many of my other favorites) on CompareRewards.com, and on my blogs on SavingAdvice and SearchChips. And out of kindness, my friend Ginger keeps a link to TipBlog in her newsletter -- and there are nearly 600 subscribers to it.

No, if anything, I'm a VICTIM of spammers -- between bogus trackbacks and bogus comments aimed at getting you to visit some online pharmacy or some adult video website, I spend a good bit of time daily deleting crud from this site to protect my users from it and to keep those sites from benefitting from MY page rank.

So how do people find this site? Aside from the link in the trivia newsletter, other folks find TipBlog through search engines -- in looking through the last 100 hits to TB, people came to the site in various ways, including searches for "jcpsurvey.com", "aquify sample", "toys r us $5 coupon", "free sample snack", "free toothbrush sample", "jcpenney coupon codes", "where to get prepaid credit cards", "printable febreze coupons", "free axe sample", and many others.

I did google Tipblog.com today to see what sites link to me, and I found a couple of interesting things. First is, that TipBlog's content is used by some sites that do appear to be splogs -- I don't want to post their URLs and benefit those idiots, but I found some of my posts put in sites that had no content except Google Ads and summaries of other sites' posts. That's annoying as heck, but I don't think there's anything I can do about it. But I also found, and I think it's worth mentioning, a review of TipBlog by McAfee Site Advisor -- showing ZERO complaints about my site.

Why am I going on and on about this? It's about integrity. I work hard and earn little to nothing for it, and when I do reach out to an advertiser program in the hopes of maybe at least making enough to cover my domain renewal fee, I get accused of something that attacks my integrity. It's uncool. It's untrue. And those of you who visit the site regularly know it.

I just had to get that off my chest. I asked the program to re-review the site. I'll let you know what they say. Okay, I now return you to your regularly scheduled daily tips. :)