News

The Fighting Splog blog has some recommendations for Google

The recommendation are:

1. Advertisers and online marketing companies should stop doing business with spammers.
2. Blogger could put limits on various activities.
3. Put a timed moratorium on newly created blogs.
4. Template tampering prevention is needed.
5. “Mark this comment as spam” feature is needed.

More details on each of these can be found in the original article. I think these are all good suggestions, and I have one more:

Stop indexing splogs. I’m sure all those engineers at Google can figure out how to tell splogs from real blogs. They should not show the splogs in the new Google Blog Search. They also shouldn’t be giving any PageRank mojo from splogs.

Doc Searls talks about how he flunked the splog Turing test. He linked to a entry from a blog, and it turns out that it was actually a splog.

This shows how difficult it is to tell splogs apart from blogs. If someone as aware of the situation as Doc Searls can get fooled, how are most people, and algorithms, supposed to tell the difference?

Google Blogoscoped recently posted an entry that takes a look at Google’s role in splogging. From the post:

So, the combination of Google web search, Google Blogger, Google Alerts and Google AdSense allows spammers to make a quick buck by polluting the web. Would it be killing the messenger to say Google has at least some responsibility for that pollution? Or are they merely a platform, and it’s up to society to handle just what can be done with this platform?

I find that to be an excellent summary of the situation.

Kailash Nadh, who created Pingoat, has announced a splog blacklist service SplogSpot. This exposes Pingoat’s blacklist database via an API.

It also features a spam search engine. Type in your keywords and it will return a list of splogs. (All splogs, no blogs!)

There is also a splog reporting tool, very similar to SplogReporter. Should SplogSpot and SplogReporter get together and have one unified interface?

These types of developments are encouraging.

Business Week had a review of Google’s new blog search. In it they noted that the search returns a lot of spam, and talked about how Google was the center of the Splog universe:

Google sits at the center of the spam-blog universe, and with its new search engine, this could get worse. Here’s why. Google already runs the biggest free blogging service in the world, Blogger. Since it’s free, easy and popular, Blogger unwittingly hosts loads of the spam blogs. Google also operates the largest automatic ad-placement service, AdSense. That provides much of the revenue for spam blogs. And you can bet that the spammers are already gaming their blogs to climb toward the top of Google’s new blog search.

They are very right. Google is in a great position to make things much better. Lets hope they do.

SplogReporter has announced a few updates to their service. The updates include:

• a bulk import which lets users upload a CSV file of URLs.
• a streamlined the collection process. Information other than the URL is no longer requested.

It is now becoming bad business to even be associated with known sploggers. Weblog Empire recently announced that it will no longer be promoting Joel Comm’s AdSense secrects e-book because he has done business with Rick Butts, a known spam blog promoter.

I applaud this move. This type of pressure really sends a message to people.

I will also stop promoting Joel Comm’s e-book on my own sites.

Technorati is hosting the Second Web Spam Summit at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California next week. (The announcement doesn’t specify the day the event will be occuring.)

They plan on discussing “comment spam, link spam, TrackBack spam, tag spam, and fake weblogs”. I guess “fake weblogs” is where splogs fit it. I’m not sure I like the term “fake weblog”, it somehow doesn’t convey the whole idea for me. Fake weblog sound more like a weblog written by a fictional character.

I hope they make some progress at this summit this summit. The list of attendees so far is: Ask Jeeves, Feedster, Google, Microsoft, Six Apart, Tucows, WordPress, and Yahoo! It sounds like they have enough of the right people there to do some damage. I would like to see IceRocket, Bloglines and Microsoft (MSN) there as well.

Found via: Somewhat Frank

The Privacy and Security Law Blog has an article describing legal options for fighting spam. Traditional email spam and blog comment spam is actively sent out to others, allowing some legal actions to be taken. Unfortunately, splog is different from other forms of spam since simply created and waits for search engines crawlers to come to it. Therefore, the legal options are more limited.

A new splog fighting website AntiSplog.net, has been launched.

According to the site

AntiSplog is a Spam blogs database which is based on an automated testing process. AntiSplog try to analyze blog content and detect different type of blogs spams. The information are recorded in database to be accessible online via a simple interface actually, that we’ll extend later with more functionalities.

You can submit the URL of a blog, and it determines whether or not it is slog. This is a promising new addition to the splog fighting toolkit.