Mark Cuban, owner of Ice Rocket, writes that blogs hosted on free blogspot domains are getting close to being eliminated from Ice Rocket and other search engines because o the increasing problem of Spam Blogs (or Splogs as they’ve been called a lot more lately). Mark also puts the finger onto Google for not doing enough about Splogs:
‘Blogger is by far the worst offender. Google seems to be working hard to adjust their relevancy indexes to exclude splog from having influence on search rankings, but they dont seem to be doing anything more than removing reported splogs. Kind of like going after the zombies one at a time with a shovel. Can we get some help on this Google?…
If you are an individual blogger whose blog is hosted on blogspot.com, every day the chances of you being excluded from icerocket.com’s, and other search engines’ indexes increases. Its not just blogspot.com, pretty much 90plus percent of blogs hosted on .info sites are splogs as well.’
I’m sure there will be plenty of legitimate blogspot.com blogs and .info bloggers out there who will have something to say about this.
For a while I had blocked blogger.com addresses on my site because nothing came through to me that wasn’t spam. I wanted to link to a blogger post once though, and it would not let me because of my own filter, so I took it away and have to remember to block specific ones as they bug me now.
This bugs me greatly, but I fear it might indeed be true. Find a blogspot blog you like. Start hitting the “next blog” button on their navbar. I’d say a good 19 out of 20 are splogs. It’s pretty sad.
I started my blog there as an experiment in sticking to one topic. I already have my own personal blog (http://www.morinfamily.com/blog) where I write about whatever I want, and Blogger afforded a no-cost way of seeing how a single subject (Shakespeare) blog would perform. (Interesting to note that my ads there get the highest CPM, by the way, but not the highest volume). If I spend the coming months trying to drive up my audience only to discover that I’m a search engine pariah because of poor Blogger policies, I’m going to be upset.
Just did a quick test and only 10 out of 20 “next blog”s in Blogger were blatant splogs. I stopped at 30, with 12 splogs and 18 non-splogs. That’s only one test, but it is actual data.
Sure, there may be a lot of splogs out there, but I’m more than a little skeptical of blatant efforts to disparage Blogger-based blogs. There’s clearly some other agenda lurking behind the anti-splogging campaign. Or, maybe it’s just a classic “let’s create a little controversy” marketing ploy.
I do think this type of finger-pointing is truly counter-productive.
If some of the search engines don’t like splogs, I’d suggest a great alternative: focus on true relevance rather than on raw links and raw text.
But, in three days it won’t matter any more to me since I’ll no longer be active in the blogosphere at that point.
— Jack Krupansky
If 1/3 to 1/2 of the Blogger sites are spam right now, it’s only a matter of time before the “real blogs” are lost in the noise.
It’s just too simple to set up a weblog (or a hundred) on Blogger. It’s a free site, and it’s going to be valued as a free site before too long – if you want to create an ecommerce site, would you host it at geocities.com?
If Google wants Blogger to have any respect at all they need to come down fast and hard on the spam weblogs, and they’ve got about six months to do that before they lose what reputation they have.
brings back memories of 9th grade english class where sister ann punished the whole class when a few of kids in the back misbehaved.
[…] Our good friend Darren over at ProBlogger has an excellent sitrep on the latest battle flaring up, over the controversy over excluding free hosted blogs from blog search domains such as Icerocket. The crux of the situation is that free hosting such as Google’s own Blogger is increasingly the domain of pages that exist solely to propogate spam. […]
Hey Darren,
I spend a fair amount of time on some of the better known IM forums and I see requests like this – “I am trying to use blogger.com and my first question is: How can I create multiple blogs. I need 5 this week!” and this – “Blogger Account Generator – Is there such a tool to assist in quickly creating a dozen or so blogger accounts?” and this – “Anyone know any good Blog Submission software – that works and is UPTODATE?”
So, we’re not living in a cave are we? I mean, could their purpose be any more clear?
Funny, I just put something up today about this myself – I agree with what Michael says above and, from a little research, think there’s more to it than most can imagine. Aaaah, but I just romanticize LOL.
Thanks Again for all you do,
Mark
It seems Google is coming down harder on bad sites. It’s not only Splogs but directories as well, nice way to get rid of any competition.
Tarring all free blog bloggers with the same brush is unfortunate but I must admit that it is becoming a big problem.
Human moderation is the key, it’s the only sure way to make sure spam doesn’t get through.
Isn’t blogger owned by Google?
A few times when I created a new blogspot blog and a couple times when I posted I noticed a human-only-readable code that required to be typed in. Not sure if this was being experimented by blogger designers or not. Seems like this will be needed for all blog creation and blog posting.
Then after they implement this system, if a blog hasn’t been updated in 6 months (or some amount of time) it should be removed (or at least not viewable).
I blogged about this issue a little while ago. I think the blog search sites like Technorati, Bloglines and Icerocket are more to blame for these problems than Blogger (and Google by association). Until recently they didn’t have to worry about spam blog, but now they do. It’s much like the early days of general search engines. The blog search services just need to find ways to deal with it.
I don’t see how this is any different from informational sites vs. sites that host spam. In the end the success is in the eye of the beholder and it’s up to the visitor to decide if your site is worth stickin’ around. If it’s legit we’ll find it and if it’s not we’ll delete it. It’s that simple.
Wow… just like that, someone can decide to delete all blogger.com blogs out of existence. I worry more from sites – or I should say people, persons, egos …. like icerocket.com .. than I do with the “splogs” (as you call them) for experimenting ways to increase traffic in their other websites. Not everybody can just transfer funds from their adsense account into their adwords account. And, as for the ratio when you surf “NEXT” in blogger, I think it’s very dependent on the posting at the time, so if you try at different times in the day, you get a different ratio.
But – you can the hit next .. Someone thinks you are spam, or a splog and deletes you from existence.. what’s next? your a liberal, democat, punk, wussy? You have poor web design??
I am on the same side as Angela – the general public and users will determine if it’s legit or not .. if it’s not working, it will go away .. and then just like everything else that has existed – something else will take it’s place.
Independent Sources has been waiting for this shoe to drop. We moved off of Blogspot several months ago. On any given Technorati search I get far too many spam sites (splogs) for this to continue unabated.
[…] Problogger: Blogspot Blogs to be Deleted from some Search Engines to combat Spam Blogs? Mark Cuban, owner of Ice Rocket, writes that blogs hosted on free blogspot domains are getting close to being eliminated from Ice Rocket and other search engines because of the increasing problem of Spam Blogs (or Splogs as they’ve been called a lot more lately). Mark also puts the finger onto Google for not doing enough about Splogs: […]
[…] Heute: Splog f�r Spam-Blog. […]
Hmm, perhaps I should bea little concerned then, as I use blogger for my blog. Although I only recently started it up, I use it because I didn’t want to pay for soemthing that may not have got me hooked.
I’d possibly now consider moving over to a ‘professional’ package, I hadn’t realised that the volume of spam blogs was so high.
Would the fact that I use my blog to talk about one of my main websites be considered spam? My blog has no specific remit, I use it to talk about anything and everything, and sometimes this involves cross-promotion of my main site. Is there some set of guidelines about what you are allowed to mention on your blogger.com blog site????
I’m a little confused about the protocol here – is this a case of the big boys looking down their noses at the little people?
Dave, you’re far from being what anyone would consider a spammer. You write your own content about your own sites, and that’s great. It might be marketing, but it certainly isn’t spam.
The spam blogs we’re talking about are generally posted to by an automated script, and the posts are nothing but (a) long lists of keywords and links to other spam sites, or (b) content stolen via RSS from other sites.
You shouldn’t be worried about Blogger thinking you’re a spammer, but you might worry that search engines (and the public) will inevitably take your site a bit less seriously because it’s on Blogger.
Blogspot-Block
Mark Cuban, Besitzer der Blog-Suchmaschine IceRocket, schreibt, dass kostenlose blogspot-Blogs kurz davor sind, aus den Suchmaschinen verbannt zu werden. Der Grund ist, dass ein großer Teil der dort gehosteten Blogs Spam Blogs, sogenannte Splogs, sin…
I believe “spam that pollutes the blogosphere” should be referred to as “SMOG”
Jim Parham (Swing Trader/Creative Thinker)
Yuba City, CA 95993
[email protected]
Good news that may help reduce some of the spam blogs on blogspot. Blogger has just recently added a flag button on the top bar next to the “next blog” button.
I wonder how quick the blogger staff will be in dealing with spam blogs once people start flagging them? There could be too many out there I suppose….
Oh, my goddness! Spam blogs flagged. Yes, we need that!
Now all google needs is to put this in their spam search engine when all the porn crap comes up. Wait they wont do that, that is their biggest money maker!
You didnt know Google was into porn? Wakeup….
I recently created Splog Reporter to help combat splog in the blogosphere. Check out this post to learn more about it: http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2005/08/splog_reporter_.html
Also be sure to visit: http://www.splogreporter.com
brings back memories of 9th grade english class where sister ann punished the whole class when a few of kids in the back misbehaved.
[…] One feature blogger has that has caused chaos in the blogspot world is that Google added a spam feature which started disabling lots of blogs. Although this is very old news it is something that still happens today and even to Google who deleted their own blog back in early 2006. […]
The essay “The Destiny of Blacklists” by Paul Graham is worth a read: http://www.paulgraham.com/spamhausblacklist.html
My friends blog receives a lot of spam comments. He has to closed it after two years running.