Comments on: Want to Help Google Clean Up Splogs?

By: Splogs, Spam, Spings, Scraper Sites and Sanity

Splogs, Spam, Spings, Scraper Sites and Sanity — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:00:25 +0000

[...] Finally, my sanity solution is to know that splogs can be reported. You know clicking on that flag in blogger or reporting to google. Perhaps more but something can be done. I did not know when I first started blogging and became upset when I saw it from a google alert on my articles but now I do. Read this post from lorelle.wordpress on helping to clean up splogs. [...]

By: Tshiananga

Tshiananga — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:34:35 +0000

hey I just wanted to say welcome to the free world!
There’s no way in stopping whatsoever, they will always find a new backdoor, another crack in the seems that will flood your ship with splogs, spams or whatever they can squeeze in there.S
So for those willing to fight against it, I’m allways down for a good cause, but to do the impossible is no resolution to me.
The reasons people advertise, or the reason people promote their products is to enhance your life, or to make a ruthless profit! But this you will never know unless you bite the cookie, and perhaps it might bite you back. Or spam/splog you. The real reason they get in is because you left the door wide open, with an invitation that says, frack me! If u want to clean up the mess they made, you should seriously consider plugging out your pc and start blogging pen and paper, 17th century style, where you can seal your private disscusion witha nice document-seal! Maybe ad a royal-ring stamp as well. All I can say, that it’s only gonna get worse. Bless you for trying tough! The Q-meister

By: Lorelle VanFossen

Lorelle VanFossen — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:55:09 +0000

@ Brenda: And it might take only a day or two. I do hope you are blogging the issue on your non-blogspot blogs, and that you have a backup of your blogspot blog. Why not import it via the Blogger/XML import to a WordPress or WordPress.com blog and get it off of Blogspot. If you are doing huge projects like this that are dependent upon free blog service requirements, you can get in trouble, so I recommend independent hosting for such projects so you have more control. Good luck!

By: Brenda

Brenda — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:19:13 +0000

I wish there was a better solution to this issue.

My personal blog is self-hosted and powered by WordPress (yay!) but I contribute to blogs on other platforms. Today the group blog of the Twelve by Twelve Collaborative Art Quilt Project was locked by Blogger’s spam prevention robots as it was [incorrectly] identified as a potential spam blog. As we were due to “reveal” our latest challenge quilts on 1 August, I suspect that the robot was triggered by the batch of posts scheduled for today. Now we cannot publish any new posts until Blogger conducts their review to verify that it is a non-spam blog and unlocks it. This process could take some time…

By: doggerelist

doggerelist — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:54:04 +0000

From necessity, I’ve recently had to look through a number of these blogspot splogs which have been scraping my wife’s blog. Virtually all of them seem to peel back in the top right hand corner to reveal dodgier sites beneath. This is one feature that without argument contravenes Blogger regulations – and is 100% indicative of a splog. One would have thought this would be easy for Google to detect automatically and remove, surely?

By: Brad

Brad — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 04:00:16 +0000

The fact is google doesn’t want to do anything about it. Why should they. These blogs can get huge amounts of traffic, most of them use adsense, and those two things turn into profit for google. Never forget they are int he business of making money.

I did a test on this about three years ago. I bought a domain put up a wordpress photoblog which simply reposted from a couple of popular google and yahoo group feeds. It was completely automatic including the insertion of tags, keywords, and other SEO. I won’t go into the details, I don’t want people doing the same thing, but on a non google ppc (I wasn’t going to risk my account) I earned $1350 in my third month and it went up from there. The blog hit PR 6 after 7 months. I flipped it when my host threatened to shut me down. Had this been an adsense based site I probably would have made 2 or 3 times what I was making. If I made that much, think how much google would have made. They have no interest in getting rid of splogs.

On the other hand if you study what these splogs are doing in terms of SEO you can beat them at their own game, even if it takes a while to do.

By: Why I Hate Blogger

Why I Hate Blogger — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:13:51 +0000

[...] there’s a good reason for this. It’s not anything to do with splogs or the overall sameness look of most Blogger blogs. It has to do with the Blogger comment [...]

By: Lorelle VanFossen

Lorelle VanFossen — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:41:46 +0000

@ Ken Nickless:

Again, the issue is not about comment spam. Akismet doesn’t help with splogs. Has nothing to do with splogs. Splogs are spam blogs. They have nothing to do with your blogs unless they use an auto-scraping tool that grabs your content via feeds and abuses it. That’s a copyright issue, a very important but different issue.

As many have said here, when you search for something, as I reported on in Google, Clean Up Blogger!, depending upon the keywords, it can be pages and pages you scroll through before you get past the splogs to real and legitimately helpful content. If I remember right, it wasn’t until page 16 or something before I got a real site in the search. Splogs clutter up search results, waste bandwidth, server space, and have no value.

EXCEPT to those who make money from our ignorance and lack of concern. Should they have the right to set up their spam blogs? It’s a legitimate way of making money, though I’d put it in the ranks of whatever you think is not a nice way of making money in your culture, but this is not the issue. The issue is whether or not they should be treated equally in the eyes of search engines as they have no content, thus, no legitimate purpose for search inclusion.

I wish it was a simple answer, but that’s why I’m turning it over to the bestest and the brightest to help brainstorm the ideas: my readers.

By: Ashley Drake Gephart

Ashley Drake Gephart — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:07:46 +0000

I have been noticing splogs more and more lately. My Google alert for Albuquerque real estate can include nothing but splogs. So I have made it my mission to search using google blog seach and flagging all those splogs. The results are getting better. Now instead of 9 out of 10 results being splogs the first page is 5 out of 10. Much better results. The flagging does work. Some of these sites had a pagerank of 3! Those are not new sites but ones that have been around a bit. Just keep flagging away until Google sets up something that works to keep them out.

By: Rufas

Rufas — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:01:01 +0000

All the issue here goes back into the bigger problem of the internet – IT IS SO EASY TO GET AN ACCOUNT… FOR FREE!!

The main purpose splogs exist is to get income – with little work as possible – from advertisements like Adsense. How hard would you think to get an Adsense account?

Same thing goes to blogs. It is too easy to setup a blog in wordpress.com, blogger.com, myspace…. They are inviting for troubles.

Even if the splogs do not make money from Adsense, they can use it for SEO purpose, which I think is black hat.

I would strongly suggest all registration must be very detail, including submitting user photo, enter PIN number from actual mail, or calls from representative to verify your identity.

No splogs can survive that.

Not to mention it works with email spammers as well.

And we’ll have a better and cleaner Internet world. Isn’t that nice?

- Rufas