Saturday, September 03, 2005

Spam: is Blogger missing the point?

Blogger’s peculiar new take on the spam problem: don’t remove spam, simply hide it from casual view:

Today, we put some artificial intelligence to work in an effort to make “Next Blog” fun and useful again for readers of BlogSpot blogs. This is the first of several steps we are taking to root out spam blogs from Blogger and BlogSpot. What we learn from cleaning up “Next Blog” spam can eventually be applied to other areas such as our changes file so that services which depend on this file will also enjoy less spam.
Riiiight. So, you’re going to make it harder for humans to spot spam blogs; but you're going to continue to make spam blogs visible to search engines so that they can still do their evil link-stuffing work.

Ah: but it’s link-stuffing which—if you explore the spam blogs I identified last Saturday—always seems to lead back to pages laden with Google AdSense adverts. I’m beginning to think that Doc Searls was right: maybe it is all about AdSense. And who gets revenue from this advertising? The publishers—the spammers, in this case—and the broker: Google. Feh. “Don’t be evil”, indeed.

In other spammy news: Matt Haughey suggests an organised Flag Day for flagging spam. Blogebrity picks up the baton. I’m in, if for nothing else than to try to keep my neighbourhood tidy. But I’m not sure it’s going to make a jot of difference.

(And yes, patient reader: I do intend to move on from spam shortly.)

Categories: Spam

Comments:

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Ah, that's nice: within 20 minutes of posting about blog spam, I get... comment spam.

I'm going to let this one stand: links in Blogger comments automatically get nofollow, so that link's effectively worthless.

But, anonymous, for piggybacking your tawdry energy-supplement spam on the back of Katrina: fuck off, you heartless worm.
Nah, they're not going to continue to make spam blogs visible to search engines either. In fact, in the post you quoted the Blogger kids said the following: This is the first of several steps we are taking to root out spam blogs from Blogger and BlogSpot. I'd asked 'em (I'm a former Blogger engineer at Google) and it turns out the Next Blog steps are just what were first to be released.

And in bottom-line terms, any revenue gained from splogs sure doesn't outweigh the trouble they cause all search engines (including ours).

It'll be great if the upcoming changes make a significant dent in sploggers' unhelpful noise. I'm hopeful.
Tried your "next blog" technique & almost immediately hit:
http://jordans-furniture.blogspot.com/
OTOH my blog is apparently objectionable, possibly because I linked to my Google sitemaps.
I also find it ironic that AdSense TOS includes, "Sites must respond adequately to support requests and enquiries of their users." Google NEVER answers any of my questions.