News

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.

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.