Is Blogger on the Offensive Against Spam?
By Jonathan Bailey • Jun 26th, 2007 • Category: Articles, NewsAs part of running this site, I subscribe to many different Technorati Watchlists. They help me keep up to date on the latest in content-theft and plagiarism-related issues.
Unfortunately, I see a great deal of spam blogs on these watchlists. What’s worse, it can be hard to tell, when looking at my RSS reader, which blogs are legitimate and which are junk. Thus, I often end up clicking through to the splogs that successfully penetrate Technorati’s armor.
Most of those spam blogs have, traditionally, been on Blogspot. However, over the past week or so, I’ve noticed that a lot of the Blogspot links have been returning results like this indicating that the blog has been locked down for “Possible Blogger terms of service violations”.
It appears that, at least based upon the sample I have, that Blogger is on a major offensive against spam blogs and that their effectiveness has gone up drastically over the past week or so. If true, this could be great news for bloggers, especially those on Google’s service, but more research is needed before a victory can be claimed.
I am looking into this matter and am trying to find out exactly what is going on. It could just be that Google has discovered the network responsible for most of the spam targeting my keywords and all of this is a fluke. However, I wanted to pose the question to everyone reading this: Have you noticed a reduction in spam from Blogspot?
I’ll be interested to hear if others are having similar experiences.
Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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I don’t necessarily get blogspot spam, just a lot of comment spam lately.
As far as scraping goes, that’s a thing in the past since I have it so Anti Leech mungs up the rss feed for any .info sites, and Digital Fingerprint hacks up the first few lines of my feeds and they really don’t get any content.
Now that I’ve said that I’ll get scraped like crazy now.
I’ve been reporting BlogSpot spam, as well as AdSense policy violations to Google for about two months now. I like to think that efforts of people like me are what is helping Google to clamp down on this stuff.
As usual, I encourage all blog readers and blog authors to report spam and other violations whenever found. You CAN make a difference.
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