(UPDATE OCT. 21: Well, apparently Google HAS done exactly what Chris Pirillo recommended. See Mark Cuban’s article from his blog today.)
I’ve gotta tell ya… As far as I can recall, virtually every slap-dash spam blog (also called search spam I’ve ever seen has been a Blogger or Blogspot blog. Here’s the
Spammers use the Blogger/Blogspot service because, well, it’s free and easy. It’s especially fast and easy to build sites that contain lots and lots of Google Adsense ads. And who owns Blogger/Blogspot? Well, um, Google does.
Hello, Google? I know you like it when people use Adsense, but this really is a problem and you should do something about it. And you can…
Over at Lockergnome, my colleague Chris Pirillio is pretty annoyed at this too. In a rather sharply worded oct. 16 article, “Google: Kill Blogspot Already!!!,” he suggests one possible and, I think pretty obvious and easy solution:
“Suggestion, Google? As bold as this might sound, you should institute an authentication system – a captcha of sorts – for every single post that gets sent through your Blogger service. This means that there’s no more easy rides for the idiots out there who are killing your baby and the blogosphere. The user logs in, enters their post, then has to jump through a captcha hoop – much like commenters have to do on Blogger.com these days. It’s a simple suggestion, and one that you really, really, really, REALLY oughta consider.”
…I’m with you on that, Chris. This is getting soooooo tiresome. And a captcha (an authentication system that requires you to prove that you’re a human being, not a program spewing automated spam, usually by typing in some text that you see displayed visually distorted on the screen) is not rocket science. You can apply a captcha to any point of any online process – even to making a blog posting.
You’d think Google would realize that blog spam only dilutes the value Adsense offers them – and that this problem will only impact their business more severely the longer they allow it to continue.
I like Google, actually. I really do. I think they do a lot of cool and important work. But really, guys, this is out of control. You can do something simple about it. You should. Please.
As far as I’m concerned, the problem is especially bad not with the one-time searches I do directly through search enginess like Google or Yahoo, but through search feeds I’ve subscribed to that send me a steady stream of fresh results on topics that interest me. These items just have to be new, they don’t have to be ranked by inbound links or anything. As far as I’ve found, this is the only way somone can spam a feed – and that seriously annoys me.
What are spam blogs, and why do sleazoids create them? I’ve covered this before. These blog facades offer no real content of their own. They simply fill their Adsense-heavy pages with content that they’ve scraped from other blogs – everything from headlines to complete articles. The stole/scraped content bears lucrative (high cost-per-click) keywords . They’re hoping that when their sites turn up in search results, you’ll go to their site and then click on the ads you find there.
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