Spamflagging Saturday
Last Saturday, in a post discussing BlogSpot’s Flag button, I linked to six spam blogs I’d identified and flagged. Today they’re all gone; in fact, as a commenter pointed out, five of them were taken down within 24 hours.
Well, that’s power; maybe the Flag button does work for spam. Or maybe not: I did also send a backchannel email to Blogger Buzz, asking about spam policies, and linking to my recent posts.
So let’s have another go, this time on flagging alone. A quick spin through twenty clicks of the Next Blog button turned up five obvious spam blogs (as before, all links are nofollow):
Again, I’ve flagged ’em, I encourage you to follow suit, and we’ll see if they last the week.
[Update Saturday, September 03: all still there.]
Doc Searls suggested earlier this week that spam blogging is driven by AdSense advertising. I’m not convinced that this is entirely the case. More often than not, spam blogs on BlogSpot don’t carry AdSense ads themselves. Only one in the small sample above does, attempting to exploit the high prices paid for treatment and pharmacetical keyword clickthroughs. The remaining four link carry no adverts, but link back to parent sites in an attempt to game Google into ranking the parent higher.
Bonus link: the Fighting Splog blog takes a much more vigorous stand against spam blogs—with some success. Although, ugh, what a horrible neologism splog is; do bloggers have to coin a new word for every single concept they come across?
Categories: Spam
Well, that’s power; maybe the Flag button does work for spam. Or maybe not: I did also send a backchannel email to Blogger Buzz, asking about spam policies, and linking to my recent posts.So let’s have another go, this time on flagging alone. A quick spin through twenty clicks of the Next Blog button turned up five obvious spam blogs (as before, all links are nofollow):
Again, I’ve flagged ’em, I encourage you to follow suit, and we’ll see if they last the week.
[Update Saturday, September 03: all still there.]
Doc Searls suggested earlier this week that spam blogging is driven by AdSense advertising. I’m not convinced that this is entirely the case. More often than not, spam blogs on BlogSpot don’t carry AdSense ads themselves. Only one in the small sample above does, attempting to exploit the high prices paid for treatment and pharmacetical keyword clickthroughs. The remaining four link carry no adverts, but link back to parent sites in an attempt to game Google into ranking the parent higher.
Bonus link: the Fighting Splog blog takes a much more vigorous stand against spam blogs—with some success. Although, ugh, what a horrible neologism splog is; do bloggers have to coin a new word for every single concept they come across?
Categories: Spam
JoeC | August 29, 2005 12:53 PM | permanent link 