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Friday, 7 April 2006

Blogger spam: nextsplogs should be tackled too






It's great that Blogger have reported progress in removing Blogspot spam blogs, or splogs, using e.g. an automatic spam classifier, with safeguards in case it wrongly classifies a legit blog as spam.

They say "By taking steps like this, we're able to dedicate more storage, bandwidth and engineering resources to our users instead of spammers."

If storage and bandwidth are considered valuable resources (which they are), then why aren't Blogger doing something about the nextsplog abuse, which I've blogged about recently, which my Magical Sheep pardner Kirk has highlighted, and which indeed Robert Scoble has also kindly mentioned on his blog?

Really, what will it take to get Google to focus on the nextsplog problem? I know bloggers using other platforms like Wordpress won't care, because it only affects those of us whose blogs are hosted on Blogger's free Blogspot - but that's an awful lot of people. Isn't the constant fake updating and hijacking of Blogger's "Next Blog" queue an abuse of bandwidth? Aren't Blogspot users concerned about the theft of traffic that should legitimately belong to them? Don't they care that these nextsplogs are stealing visitors who ought to be going to genuinely-updated Blogspot blogs - like yours?

It seems not. Maybe it really is "can't beat 'em join 'em" time.


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Forget all they hype if you want to get in to Google results ie top ten you have to be a spammer, in fact google rewards spammers and the more pages you have indexed the better it is for you.

Google rewards spammers by granting them magical qualties so that what ever drivel they link to also gets a high ranking.

Forget all this drivel about you have to have links, and the Google sandbox crap if you want to get a top ten positon in google you have to have at least 400 pages indexed upwards this seem to be the Minimum number required. For eg do a search for Cheap holidays and you will get this.



www.bargainholidays.com/ 530 pages
www.cheapflights.co.uk 940,000 spam pages
sister site to cheapholidaydeals.co.uk betwean them they have over 1 million pages of spam.
www.barrheadtravel.co.uk 38,400 spam pages
www.barrheadtravel.co.uk/holidays/ spam pages listed twice
www.holiday.co.uk/ 43,100 spam pages
www.cheapholidaydeals.co.uk/
157,000 spam pages
www.flightline.co.uk/ 480OO spam pages
www.packyourbags.com/ 49,400 spam pages
www.cheapholidays.com 657 spam
pages owned by this site www.flightline.co.uk/
www.latedeals.com/ - 485 spam
pages



A word of warning any travel site for eg listed here with more than 400 pages should be considered a spammer and as such should be avoided and considered poor quality.

Google Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.