A few more high profile bloggers have been complaining about splogs stealing content. Here’s John Battelle
We need to address this….
And Om Malik:
Anyway I think the problem of splogs and scraping can be fixed if Google steps’ up to the plate.
A few more high profile bloggers have been complaining about splogs stealing content. Here’s John Battelle
We need to address this….
And Om Malik:
Anyway I think the problem of splogs and scraping can be fixed if Google steps’ up to the plate.
A new study shows that 75% of pings are generated from splogs. The report analysis pings from weblogs.com over a four week period.
we used our work on splog detection to detect splogs (and hence spings) among the english blogs. Our detection mechanism is close to 90% accurate. As shown in the charts below pings from blogs average around 8K per hour and those from splogs average around 25K.
This is the most comprehensive study of splogs I have seen, and the results are not that surprising to me. This shows that splogs are clearly out of control.
They are also publishing live statistics of blog languages and blogs vs. splogs at http://memeta.umbc.edu/
Found via: The Blog Herald
Mark Cuban has another blog entry dealing with splogs. This time he is responding to a complaint by Steve Rubel that his content is being stolen. Mark’s answer to the problem is to have Blog search engines not index splogs that steal content; only the original entry would be indexed.
This is only half the solution, though. It’s not just blog search engines that find blog content, regular search engines do too. It’s a little harder for regular search engines to filter out duplicate blog entries because they have no knowledge of individual entries, only pages, and its harder for them to know the originator of content if the content is stolen quickly.
While I was gone (because of a crashed hard drive, vacation and business travel, all in a row), Plagiarism Today posted an excellent article.
It pretty much nails all the issues that are relevant in the splog war today, and as often happens in articles about splog, puts Google right in the middle of things.
Google, however, has been a mixed ally in this matter. Though they took token steps to prevent splogs from being created on their service, those steps have proved inadequate and no further plans have been made.
One of the solutions suggested in the article, which makes sense to me, is cutting back on the automation in the blog world.
Perhaps it’s time that we removed some of the automation from the blogging world. Perhaps pings, trackbacks and comments should come with some form of authorization. Even a simple Hashcash setup, a system by which a user has to take a few seconds to complete a simple task before finishing an action, could go a long way to fix the problem.
It can be a hassle for legitimate bloggers, as was seen when Blogger introduced captchas for posting, it probably is time to start taking more serious steps.
The Guardian has published a splog article today. The article is fairly well written and gets seems to get things right. Again, most of the focus is on Google because they provide an infrastructure to create splogs with Blogger, and a way to earn money with AdSense.
Here is a quote from Jason Goldman, product manager for Blogger:
“Spam blogs cost Google money both on the hosting and infrastructure side for Blogger as well on the AdSense side with spam prevention,” says Goldman. “We take our obligation to our AdSense advertisers seriously and spam, left unchecked, would dilute the confidence our advertisers place in us. By being aggressive on combating spam, we want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
To me this seems like a golden opportunity for Google. If they can figure out how to filter out the splogs, not only will it make AdSense advertisers happy, but it will also make their search results much better. I can’t understand why Google seems to need to be dragged into this fight instead of leading it.
The author of the story, Michael Pollitt, also has additional commentary on his blog.
Found via Spam Chongqing
Another mainstream media outlet, the Washington Post, has an article on splog. It basically pretty standard stuff. They did one small mistake though, they confused comment spam and splogs. Comment spam are not splogs. They are two separate things.
In addition to polluting the internet, it seems sploggers are starting to create more problems. Randy Charles Morin of KBCafe had set up a free RSS subscription service, that would let blog owners make it easier for visitors to subscribe. A splogger started using this service and put the Javascript for the service on thousands of blogs, causing bandwidth problems for the service. Unfortunately Randy has has to shut down the service because of this issue.
Thanks to Mark Woodman for pointing this out.
Mitch Ratcliffe responded to my entry that criticized his How to get Google to fix BlogSpot post. Since I think this is an important issue. I elevated this to a full post instead of the argument getting lost in the comments.
Here is Mitch’s response in full:
At no point do I suggest click fraud, what I suggested is that when bloggers receive spam postings they go to the sources of those sites and click the ads there. It would not target legitimate Blogspot (or other hosts that facilitate splogs) publishers, just the abusers. It would not be “random.”
This would create pain for advertisers—it won’t drive them away, because AdSense works—but it will make them demand Google explain why they are getting much lower conversion rates. They will petition Google for relief, which is what advertising customers do (and I speak from experience as a publisher). These kinds of campaigns could be conducted in narrow timeframes by groups of bloggers who are tired, as I am, of cleaning spam postings out of their comments and trackbacks.
Finally, there is a general tone that this is wrong because it is bad business. I am suggesting a political statement, not a business decision. If Google bans me for clicking other people’s ads, they would have to prove I was commiting fraud, which is not the case if I am clicking on ads on other people’s sites. I’m justs surfing. But, frankly, if Google cut off AdSense on my site it would do nothing to my ability to earn money from the site. There are other ad programs that will pay me a few dollars a month, too.
We shouldn’t be so timid about the information environment we live in. Google’s contributing to information pollution and we should act to stop them.
I think you are naive, JoeChong, if you think Google can afford to impose quality controls. It would slash their margins, raising ad prices overall, and prevent many bloggers and publishers from ever being seen by Google searchers.
This is my response.
First of all, in my mind, if you click on an AdSense ad with no intention at all of seeing what’s on the other side, you are committing click fraud. I’m sure Google would agree. This is a similar tactic that a website owner would take when he sees a competitors website advertising on AdSense, and click on the ad just to hurt his competitor.
Wikipedia defines click fraud as: “Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating an improper charge per click.”
Second, I think you are confusing two different types of spam: comment spam and splogs (spam blogs). These are two different techniques spammers use to get links to their sites. Just to be sure, I checked the links of 18 of my comment spams and not one pointed to a blogspot blog or a splog.
Your assertion that the type of click activity you suggest won’t drive advertisers away from AdSense is also wrong. Many AdWords advertisers already don’t participate in Google’s content network (third party publishers) and only place ads in Google own search results. They have been burned in the past by low quality sites so they opt out of the whole content network.
Your strategy is equivalent to someone saying that they don’t approve of porno magazines, so to hurt porno magazines, they will go into every store that advertises in porno magazines and shoplift from them. Once the stores figure out that people are shoplifting from them because they advertise in porno magazines, the advertisers will stop ads in porno magazines and so the porn will go away. It is such a back-assward way of doing things.
Again, as an AdSense publisher, an AdWords advertiser, and a person who hates splogs, I am pleading with you not to partake in this type of nonsense. It just doesn’t make sense. This activity will help the sploggers and hurt the AdSense/AdWords ecosystem.
Mitch Ratcliffe has a blog entry on How to get Google to fix BlogSpot.
I think the advice in it is terrible. He suggests: “The solution to the problem it to click gratuitously and never make purchases on the links at blogspot sites and to keep doing so to drive down conversion rates.”
This is called click fraud. Don’t do it. This will do nothing but achieve the following:
Again, I can’t stress enough that this is a bad idea and would encourage sploggers to create even more splogs.
Update: The problem is now fixed
I got this following comment from Brady Westwater to my post about Blogger adding captcha. I wanted to elevate this to a full post to see if anyone could help him out.
on October 20th, 2005 at 12:20 am
I have not been able to post for two days. All I get is:006 Please contact Blogger Support.blog/46/41/4/lacowboy/index.html
Doe anyone have any idea what this means? Is it a website?
And there is no one at blogger support who will return e-mails..
To contact him, you can find his email if you go to his blog and check his profile.