This free link from the Journal focuses on a story that has grown over the past few months into a national discussion – what to do about spam blogs. Google’s blogger is a major culprit – some claim as much as 90% spam on that platform. From the Journal’s piece:
Spammers have created millions of Web logs to promote everything from gambling Web sites to pornography. The spam blogs — known as “splogs” — often contain gibberish, and are full of links to other Web sites spammers are trying to promote. Because search engines like those of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. base their rankings of Web sites, in part, on how many other Web sites link to them, the splogs can help artificially inflate a site’s popularity. Some of the phony blogs also carry advertisements, which generate a few cents for the splog’s owner each time they are clicked on.
The phony blogs are a particular problem for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo because each offers not only a Web search engine focused on providing the most relevant results for users but also a service to let bloggers create blogs.
More: Tim Bray, Mark Cuban
Fed by our ongoing research into the splog menace, our latest post Meet the Sploggers adds value to the conversation on splogs, by exposing sploggers and their motivations.
To be fair, most free blog sites subsidize spam. A lot of it.
Scott Johnson over at Feedster says 90% of new blogs are spam. And Findory’s Greg Linden estimates 95% of the new blogs his recommendation engine finds are spam.
Many Splogs use Ad Sense to make revenue. So Google is anti-incentivized (is this a word) to delete Blogger sites from its search, it’s also makes money if people click on the Ad Sense ads in a Splog.
Weird.