Destroy All Malware gives a State of the Splogosphere update:
In the six months since my last piece, the percentage of blogs that are splogs is on the decline and major blogging platforms (Blogspot) have done a great job of cleaning up their act. A big congratulations go to Technorati and Google blog search, which has considerably improved their splog detection.
Early splogosphere growth occurred on hosted blogging platforms, like Blogspot. Lately, splogs are mostly found on self-hosted blogging platforms, primarily WordPress. This has moved the fight against splogs from the domain of blog hosting services, to the domain of blog aggregation services and blog search engines.
Is blogspam gone from Google Blog Search, Technorati, and Blogger? Of course not. But is is better than a few months ago? Yup, I’d say so, and I expect folks to continue to work on reducing blogosphere pollution.
Update: Correcting the name of the site.
I agree – great strides have been made.
I have found Askimet to be a great tool for combatting comment spam. It almost always gets it right and is a very clever model in using the community to learn.
Getting rid of splogs is a good thing. I think my non-splog site was caught in this dragnet, though, like a person walking back from the grocery store who is rounded up with a bunch of passing drug dealers and sent to Guantanamo. Precisely on October 21st all my Google traffic was cut by 75%. My sites uses WordPress as its management tool, but it’s a completely white-hat, manually maintained site that I have personally developed week after week for more than a year.
Is there anything webmasters can do to make sure their sites aren’t mistaken for splogs?
Agreed. Blog spam is definitely down over what it has been.
Typo cops.
Destory Malware or Destroy All Malware?
LOL -well, if people like me go for other methods of spam (or even some white hat sites – OH MY!) then the situation will get even better!
I’ve removed over 100,000 blogs in the past few months alone 😛
Hey Matt, what are you guys planning on doing about blogspot spam? That seems to be pretty rampant. Even with the number of blogs that get deleted, I still see a bunch of them get created and stick around…
G-Man
Matt
Talking about spam. Does WebSpam Team still paying attention to Spam in other languages? or was it a one time visit 😉
Reason I’m asking is our largest compititor is deploying search engine cloaking through subdomains in day light, while we are operating our SEO/SEM within Google Guidlines and assigning five figure $ to our AdWords campaignes. Not a fair competition at all 🙁
And yes, that incident was reported to Google.
There’s gotta be some WP plugin for managing comments across multiple blogs. I am wasting a lot of time moderating when time should be spent on other things.
One of the problems is that RSS feeds that are not “personal diaries” are quite often reported as being a splog.
Often some of that content is duplicate, but then so is Google News.
Is grading content based on original source a duty best performed by splog hunters or search engine algorithms?
If article content is used with permission, even supporting the express wishes of the original author, surely such content shouldn’t be labelled as splog.
Sometimes 3rd party content can be used to create a better user experience, and give more relevance to a focused niche subject.
Matt will this lead to WP bias in indexing? Are they just the best free software and therefore creating more splog problems?
Smooth and efficient spam free blogosphere travel is really most excellent dude, cough cough. ;o)
I am enjoying the blogs URLS coming in via my google alerts, so far all are real and useful.
What do you think about the Spam Report Extension Matt? Is google cool with it? https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3875/
Thank you.
Aaron
What advice or methods do you have for us as a community to help fight spam? Reporting tools? Plugins? I know I’m up for taking a minute of my day to report spammy sites and do my part.
There have been a dramatic decrease in the amount of frivilous Blogs …(S.P.A.M.) is a term that should fall out of usage
However, in their understandable aggressive cleansing acts, there have been many false positives…and innocent blogs are being penalyzed 😐
Newer Blogs must now be VERY Careful about the words and topics they cover that could potentially trigger Red Flags in the Spam Filtering Algos.
Thank you for the joke, Matt. Is today April, 1st?
Matt, please don’t post links like that. There are those of us out there that are so geeky that we actually focused on the guid querystring before looking at the article itself and found it harder to read as a result.
Okay, so I’m probably the only one who would notice that. 😉
Personally, I think the bigger problem isn’t the comment spam, but the ever-increasing number of “blogchures” (my word) out there that do nothing other than to act as a promotional section for the sale du jour.
(P.S. you’ve got a minor typo in the first word of the post, although if you did want a meme, you could make “destory” a verb meaning “to denounce or disprove an online myth and to present factual evidence in its place.” If you do that, though, I get royalties. You can have credit, but I get royalties. 😉 )
I’d really hate to see a bias in the Google search results against self hosted wordpress blogs. I think it would be a very bad move and could be very detrimental to many blogs across the internet which rely on google for targeted , relevant traffic. I’m not saying don’t keep an eye open on this sort of activity, I’m just requesting that your company be very careful and deliberate with anything along these lines.
http://digg.com/tech_news/Commission_Junction_Screw_Affiliates_Out_of_Valid_Earnings
So are goggle going to rid the world of shady business pratices like the one above ( CJ ), when they fully launch the CPA Adsense and any idea how many merchants will be included ?
And is this directly targetting middlemen like CJ. Personally I would hope that google won’t be in the business of reversing verified leads.
Sorry I’m a little off topic, but this little story struck too close to home.
Matt, I agree, blog spaming was low now! Thanks to blogger and Google, i am having a blog and until now it is not spamed 🙂
Pratheep
Matt, a blog that is created with the sole purpose of reaping ad revenues and capturing search engine results can be called a spam blog. In most of the cases, a spam blog is created/run and maintained by an automated program, which we commonly call ‘bots’. Some spam blogs disguise so well that you sometimes end up reading it for hours !
Hi Matt,
Do you still find that your site has a high level of spam? I don’t have my own blog so I wasn’t really aware of blog spam as a problem.
Can you please ask someone at AdWords to dismiss customers who create splogs and link farms? I can’t tell you how many I’ve run across that have AdWords. What is the percentage of Google revenue that is accumulated by not enforcing content quality? I would say 3-5%. It’s not enough to just remove this spam from the Google index. You need to go to the core — where people make money– and remove it as a motivation to spam. It’s disingenuous to make money from spam while actively proclaiming to be fighting it.
I’m fine with that extension, Aaron. I like the idea. Thanks for mentioning it.
Utah Internet Marketing, you could use this extension, but the best place to report spam is under the “Tools” box in the webmaster console (search for [webmaster tools] ).
Greetings Matt,
I know this is off topic and may be posted in your blog somewhere, but I was wondering if Google has any comments about the problems the DMOZ has been having for the past 2 months? That seems like a long time to be having server problems?? If they are as quick at getting things fixed as they are at approving sites then you can expect DMOZ to be back up in about 2 – 5 years time or even longer than that.
As part of the research for trying to get my site to number #1 in google for my favorite keywords, I’ve been keeping track of a website http://www.ansearch.com.au via google alerts which has a very good ranking in alot of areas.
Today my alerts tell me it appears to be through bloggspot.com spamming.. there are dosens of nonsense sites setup on blogspot linking to this website..
So, does that mean to stay ahead of the competition I should do likewise? I ethically dont like the idea of clogging up the net, so what should I do in a situation like this?
I’m #1 in msn and yahoo for my favorite terms, but im still trying to get up there on google.. I’m a beginner with SEO.
When searching for the term edmonton limousine – a site that was using hidden text and reported for 9 months to google before it disappeared from the search results and reappeared after one month of absence – as the third result…..why would that occur ???…..the site was using hidden text on top and bottom of it’s page and also came up first for edmonton limos……..this is confusing as using a black hat technique seems to be rewarding the concerned site. I tagged my site for google verfication and it didn;t seem to help – this hurts honest business people that abide by the google parameters – I am intersted in your comment.
Greetings,
Matt, I support the anti-spam movement. But the new Robots have — by Google’s own system’s admission — detected some, but not all, of my blogs as spam.
Can you help expedite the restoration of my blogs, one of which is at:
http://zennie2005.blogspot.com
….and all are under my email of zennie.abraham@gmail.com
Thanks,
Zennie Abraham
Having trouble with spam? Searching for http:// or href= in any of the fields will terminate 99% of spam. Hint: use implode($_POST,””) in PHP! This works 99% of the time for me