Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Status of the Splogosphere
SpamFighter has a disappointing post on his work at reporting splogs to Blogger for deletion. He was doing really well for a good while with several thousand per week being deleted. Now he is getting NO results.
He also discusses the changes in splog form since Blogger got serious about spam. He says many sploggers are creating throw away splogs that are never updated again. Maybe Google is happy enough with the slow down that they aren't worried about deleting them anymore.
Spam is not something that can be ignored so I hope Blogger doesn't think they are doing a good enough job with their prevention methods. If you are getting a free list of splogs from a reliable source why not use it? I understand that they can't just trust all splog submissions they get without checking, but after the first ten thousand or so verified splogs you would think they would learn to trust a reporter and put higher weight on his reports.
What I really wonder is how come SplogFighter can do such a good job identifying spam blogs. With all the resources of Google behind them, shouldn't Blogger already be finding and removing these splogs? There shouldn't be any easy splogs left for an outsider to find with automated tools. They should be down to the tough ones that require manual inspection.
Luckily deleting splogs on blogspot is not the only method SpamFighter uses, he also goes after AdSense so still has ways of getting at the spammers. Spammers are often clearly violating AdSense rules so attacking them this way should work on many spammers as long as they keep using AdSense.
He also discusses the changes in splog form since Blogger got serious about spam. He says many sploggers are creating throw away splogs that are never updated again. Maybe Google is happy enough with the slow down that they aren't worried about deleting them anymore.
Spam is not something that can be ignored so I hope Blogger doesn't think they are doing a good enough job with their prevention methods. If you are getting a free list of splogs from a reliable source why not use it? I understand that they can't just trust all splog submissions they get without checking, but after the first ten thousand or so verified splogs you would think they would learn to trust a reporter and put higher weight on his reports.
What I really wonder is how come SplogFighter can do such a good job identifying spam blogs. With all the resources of Google behind them, shouldn't Blogger already be finding and removing these splogs? There shouldn't be any easy splogs left for an outsider to find with automated tools. They should be down to the tough ones that require manual inspection.
Luckily deleting splogs on blogspot is not the only method SpamFighter uses, he also goes after AdSense so still has ways of getting at the spammers. Spammers are often clearly violating AdSense rules so attacking them this way should work on many spammers as long as they keep using AdSense.
