Monday, October 17, 2005
IceRocket vs. Google Splogs
Thanks to Google's (almost non-existant) efforts to stop spam on Blogspot.com, IceRocket has temporarily stopped indexing blogs on Blogspot. Last night Mark Cuban said this is because some spammer just started using a script that "could easily turn into 10s of THOUSANDS of blogs pinging out millions of posts!" It seems that Blogger should be able to easily filter these out before being created.
Isn't it nice to have your blog on a service so full of crap.
I ran across this news from FightSplog.com. He also points out that major bloggers are getting after Google for the splog problem again. Splog news seemed to die down for a bit and then so did Google's minimal efforts to prevent them. So now people are noticing the huge splog problem again.
The other FightSplog, like me, is a victim of being hosted on Blogspot. He has been reporting tons of splogs to Google and has some observations. Google does not appear to be removing splogs on their own anymore. They will usually clean them if someone sends in a report or maybe if enough people flag a splog. But if they have any tools to find and remove splogs they aren't working.
After saying some bad stuff about Blogspot, Chirs Pirillo of Lockergnome actually got a response from Google. Somehow he expects we will see results on this real soon.
But as I have posted about before, why would Google want to solve the splog problem anyway. All they need to do is not rank them high in their search index and let all the other search engines deal with them. Any search engine that can't handle the huge amount of spamdexing crap will drive away users. And where they will go for searches next, to the biggest supporter of splogs, Google.
Update 5:20pm: It seems that IceRocket's block of Blogspot didn't last very long. This post is now in IceRocket's index. I think they should have left it on for a bit. Google/Blogspot's splog problem needs more publicity.
Isn't it nice to have your blog on a service so full of crap.
I ran across this news from FightSplog.com. He also points out that major bloggers are getting after Google for the splog problem again. Splog news seemed to die down for a bit and then so did Google's minimal efforts to prevent them. So now people are noticing the huge splog problem again.
The other FightSplog, like me, is a victim of being hosted on Blogspot. He has been reporting tons of splogs to Google and has some observations. Google does not appear to be removing splogs on their own anymore. They will usually clean them if someone sends in a report or maybe if enough people flag a splog. But if they have any tools to find and remove splogs they aren't working.
After saying some bad stuff about Blogspot, Chirs Pirillo of Lockergnome actually got a response from Google. Somehow he expects we will see results on this real soon.
But as I have posted about before, why would Google want to solve the splog problem anyway. All they need to do is not rank them high in their search index and let all the other search engines deal with them. Any search engine that can't handle the huge amount of spamdexing crap will drive away users. And where they will go for searches next, to the biggest supporter of splogs, Google.
Update 5:20pm: It seems that IceRocket's block of Blogspot didn't last very long. This post is now in IceRocket's index. I think they should have left it on for a bit. Google/Blogspot's splog problem needs more publicity.
