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