Bad Part of Blog Town

Two observations:

#1 – In my various vanity feeds on Technorati and Feedster, for the last month about half of the hits on either my name or the name of this blog result in splogs that have obviously been created by googling on a term, scraping the results and splatting that onto a blog page.

#2 – Over on AmigoFish I made the feed submission require a logged-in user. I did this because of a barrage of robots trying to submit splog URLs to it. They never did any damage because they were submitting the main URL to something that required an RSS feed to continue but eventually I figure they’ll wise up. Although I drop packets from that IP when I see it happening, I get between a few hundred and a few thousand of these attempts a day.

Can you guess what these two observations have in common? In almost every case, the splogs being created and being submitted all originate from one domain: Blogspot.com. At this point, if I treated any Blogspot URL as being bogus for any possible occurrence when I see it, I’d be right more than I’d be wrong. Already, searches on third party services are increasing polluted by these splogs and it is just getting worse. Here’s a very typical example of what I see (not linking to avoid helping them in any google juice sort of way): bootleg-download-free-movie-bfeq.blogspot.com .

If they don’t straighten up their act Really Fricking Soon Now, it will become the equivalent of the bad part of town that the pizza delivery guys and ambulance drivers refuse to go. If Google/Blogger/Blogspot doesn’t fix whatever hole is letting automated process create these spam blogs at will, the sensible reaction from the rest of the blogosphere will be to treat it as a rogue domain and ignore it, much like mail systems do with domains that become havens for email spammers. In either case, legitimate users are the collateral damage and it sucks. However, just the existence of so many Blogspot splogs reduces the value of the service for even the legitimate users, the blogosphere at large and the tools that help manage it. Blogspot people, fix this now.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

2 thoughts on “Bad Part of Blog Town”

  1. I have the feeling that the reason Google bought Blogger was to use Blogspot as a “sandbox” to study linking patterns, advertisement clicking patterns, and maybe even splogs. If I am right, then they could probably use this information to improve their search. In the course of doing this, though, they provide a sploggers a perch to piss on the rest of the net.

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