News

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:

1. Put money in the sploggers pockets
2. Take money away from advertisers. With a bad experience like this advertisers may actually leave AdSense all together.
3. Risk your own publisher account. If you have a publisher account and Google catches you performing click fraud they will ban your account

Again, I can’t stress enough that this is a bad idea and would encourage sploggers to create even more splogs.

It seems like Google has taken a small step towards stemming the tide of splog on blogger. They have implemented a captcha system for suspicious blogs. The captcha will only be used if their spam detectors identifies the blog as spammy.

I’m glad to see some concrete action being taken. Obviously much more needs to be done.

Found via: fighting splog

Google has publically responded to the outcry about splog via their Blogger Buzz blog. One thing they talk about is improving their spam detection algorithm.

A big goal in deploying the filtered NextBlog and Flag as Objectionable was to improve our spam classifiers. As we improve these algorithms, we plan to pass the filtered information along automatically.

That’s certainly a good start. Another thing they have done is published a list of deleted subdomains. Currently there are over 13,000 subdomains listed.

They dismiss using captchas for each post as a solution because it limits accessibility and does not allow posting via API. I agree that captchas do have problems and are not the ultimate solution. I do think, however, that some type of limit will need to be placed on posting, or else the sploggers will keep getting the upper hand. Not indexing new blogs for a few days until they can be determined whether they are splog or not may help a little. Limiting the number of posts up-loadable via the API may help as well.

They also note that this is going to be an ongoing problem. It sure is.

Found via fighting splog.

Fighting Splog has an explanation for this weekends outrage about splogs. It seems there was a single splogger who created tens of thousands of splogs. Presumably these splogs also happened to target popular bloggers names.

He, like most, puts the blame squarely on Google:

I wonder if Google will finally do something about splog problem now. Honestly I really doubt it and here is the reason why. Currently Google makes money whenever spammers makes money.

I think that has been a lot of the problem, Google has not really had any incentive to do anything. Hopefully, now that the splog problem has gotten more attention, Google will not be able to avoid doing something this problem.

Google does say they “Do no evil”. Splogs are evil. They need to do something about it.

Mark Cuban announced that the number of splogs on BlogSpot has gotten so bad that IceRocket will temporarily stop indexing BlogSpot blogs until they can get a reasonable filter in place. He warned about this in an earlier post.

He says:

So google, at least for the time being, we shut out adding new blogspot posts to our index until we clean all the bullshit you dumped on us out of our indexes. We will turn them on once we update our filters to resolve this fine mess you got us into , which hopefully will be tomorrow

Google is catching a lot of flack for this from some high profile sources this weekend. They need to do something pretty quickly to get things under control, or their reputation is going to be seriously damaged.

Lets see some action, Google!

It seems like many popular bloggers picked this weekend to get fed up with splogs.

Check out all the action:

Tim Bray has two posts, Splogs and Splogsplosion , the later of which concludes “Uh, ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, I think we have an emergency on our hands.”

Chris Pirillo starts of with Google: Kill Blogspot Already!!! and gets a response from Google that makes it sound like they just discovered this problem: “Just wanted to let you know I brought up your post internally. We’ll be doing something about it shortly. Sorry for the trouble it caused you and thanks for bringing it up!” That doesn’t sound very promising

Jeff Jarvis get angry and says “Google needs to both fix Blogspot and share its secrets for ignoring blogspam” with his post: F the Spam Bloggers

A post by Dave Winer (who just sold weblogs.com, the blog pinging service, to Verisign) shows some promise: “Good news about that, I had lunch with Niall Kennedy at Technorati on Thursday, in SF, and we’re going to do some work to help get better data to flow into Technorati.”

I’m glad to see this finally getting a lot of attention.

The Second Web Spam Summit was hosted by Technorati and held ad the Googleplex a couple of weeks ago. Since then, we have not heard anything from any of the participants about it. What happened there? Was there nothing worth talking about or was everyone sworn to secrecy?

Inquiring minds want to know.

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.