The scourge of Blog Spam
p2p news / p2pnet: You knew they were coming, and now they’re here.
Splogs.
Google’s Blogger blog-creation tool and BlogSpot hosting service, together the most popular free blogging service on the Web, “fell victim this past weekend to the biggest splog attack yet – an assault that led to clogged RSS readers and overflowing in-boxes, and that may have manipulated search engine rankings,” says CNET News, going on:
“The scope of the attack, and the sophisticated automation used to accomplish it, mark a turning point for splogging, a problem experts say has been building for some time.”
And, says CNET, it’s not clear what Google or anyone else can do about it.
“The attacker, or splogger, used automated tools to manipulate the Blogger-BlogSpot service and create thousands of fake blogs loaded with links to specific Web sites (home mortgage, poker and tobacco sites among them). The move was designed to doctor search results and boost traffic to those sites by fooling the search-engine spiders that crawl the Web looking for commonly linked-to destinations.”
On his blog, "In the past few days, I’ve been inundated with an enormous amount of subscribed search spam for designated keywords," says Chris Pirillo. "To the tune of hundreds, if not THOUSANDS, of bunk entries. Who knew ‘lockergnome’ and "’pirillo’ would be THAT popular?! Still, I can’t help but think that others are having the same headaches – and 99% of the crap coming in is directly from a single domain: blogspot.com.
"Google, it may have been a smart acquisition in the beginning, but y’all need to clean house in a big way. You’re the tallest nail, and you’re really getting pounded – and now others, who aren’t even using your service, are getting pounded. Blogspot has become nothing but a crapfarm, and your brand is going to go down with it. If your motto truly is to do no evil, then you need to start putting some resources behind an effort to curb this train wreck."
And in an update, "Even though my sound card is dying, I managed to record a screencast of the splog problem as I woke up to it this morning," said Pirillo last Saturday. "It’s bad. Real bad. Really, really bad (not just the audio, but the entire splog situation).
"This isn’t Technorati’s, PubSub’s, Feedster’s, or anybody’s fault but Google’s – wholly."
CNET has Google Blogger product manager Jason Goldman saying the company is trying to sort out the splog problem but admitted, “the weekend attack showed that those preventative tools are ‘broken’ and serve as deterrents rather than outright solutions.
“He also said Google launched a feature Wednesday that would force suspected spammers to transcribe distorted words before pushing through individual blog posts. And he said Google is not alone in being attacked.”
Sploggers use automated tools against the Blogger-BlogSpot service, creating, “thousands of fake blogs loaded with links to specific Web sites (home mortgage, poker and tobacco sites among them),” says CNET.
“The move was designed to doctor search results and boost traffic to those sites by fooling the search-engine spiders that crawl the Web looking for commonly linked-to destinations.
The counterfeit blogs also triggered thousands of RSS feeds and e-mail notifications, swamping RSS readers and in-boxes, it states.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
CNET News – Tempted by blogs, spam becomes ’splog’, October 20, 2005
blog – Google: Kill Blogspot Already!!! , October 16, 2005
October 20th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
the whole adsense system is seriously flawed.
85% or more of paid out clicks on google adsense are competitors either wasting your funds or checking out your site or you doing the same to their sites. and google takes a cut of it all.
October 21st, 2005 at 12:04 am
Splog Reporter (http://www.splogreporter.com) was created to address the splog problem in the blogosphere. Check it out and take an active role in cleaning up the blogosphere of splog.
Cheers,
Frank Gruber
http://www.splogreporter.com
http://www.somewhatfrank.com
October 21st, 2005 at 3:30 pm
If these people want you to visit their site and order their product, then DO SO. Onlt use real looking but fake names and cc numbers or use the names addresses and telephone numbers of judges and politicians. Only when these people get harrassess with no end will they close the loopholes that allow these people to funtion.
You can get real looking but fake information by visiting
http://www.plaza1.net/spammerslammer.cgi
That webpage randomly selects a zipcode and then looks up the corresponding city and telephone area code. It then randomly selects a standard credit card TEST number from a list. These test credit card numbers are always decline (they are used for testing credit card terminals).