Recently, Jeff and I have become extremely busy with our personal lives yet we continue to receive praise, questions and requests via our SR feedback page just about everyday. To be quite honest with you we cannot keep up with all of the feedback.

In realizing our short-handedness, we would be willing to bring on some help in the spirit of the movement to continue to move the product forward in a positive manner by developing out some of the requested features that we have received as feedback.

If you think you may be able to help out, let them know.

The two posts have generated a lot of comments on Randy’s site, debating whether or not the site is splog. I have to agree with Randy on this one for calling the creator of the site out. The site is re-posting full text of entire feeds without permission, clearly making it a copyright violation. Whether or not to call the site “splog” does not seem as clear cut. The site is different from typical splog which is usually not useful to anyone at all, and is created mostly to get hits from search engines. So I would say this is borderline splog.

Okay, I’m most interested in hearing what people think Google should tackle in webspam. Based on your experiences, close your eyes and think about what area(s) you wish Google would work on. You probably want to think about it for a while without viewing other people’s comments, and I’m not going to mention any specific area that would bias you; I want people to independently consider what they think Google should work on to decrease webspam in the next six months to a year.

I won’t bias you with my thoughts on it either, but you probably have a good idea of what I think the biggest problem is

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.

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.

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.

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

Thanks to Mark Woodman for pointing this out.

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.