Google Blogoscoped

Monday, August 29, 2005

Blogspot: More Spam Than Anything Else


This screenshot is doctored

Marty Kay made an interesting comment in regard to Splogs (spam blogs) on Google’s Blogspot.com:
“Funniest thing I saw was a bunch of comments on one spam/link site, that was totally irrelevant but pointed to ANOTHER spam site. The spammers are spamming each other.”

I was curious – how many spam blogs does Google have on their Blogspot server? To get a feeling for this, I’m using the following URL, which brings me to a random blog each time I access it:
www.blogger.com/redirect/next_blog.pyra?navBar=true

Now here’s what I found in chronological order. I’m defining “Spam” as any blog that apparently is automated, in order to link to and therefore promote a certain product (mostly, promote it in terms of Google rankings) or to show off Google AdSense. Anything that you would write manually, whether or not you promote a product, would not count as spam here.

1.bangg0e.blogspot.comSpam
2.mainthime.blogspot.comSpam
3.www.goferboy.commattcindex.htmNormal
4.patsportal.blogspot.comNormal
5.physicianemploymentpwt.blogspot.comSpam
6.moneybusiness.blogspot.comSpam
7.digitalaudiocfd.blogspot.comSpam
8.slutsuzie.blogspot.comNormal
9.newmahjong.blogspot.comSpam
10.karen87421.blogspot.comNormal
11.fauna-lovers.blogspot.comNormal
12.officialcaribbean.blogspot.comSpam
13.dvdcopierawn.blogspot.comSpam
14.decor-home.blogspot.comSpam
15.nursewillpowercanhelp.blogspot.comSpam
16.meds4u.blogspot.comSpam
17.geekbitch.blogspot.comNormal
18.camouflagec54.blogspot.comSpam
19.landsofdespair.blogspot.comNormal
20.panegyrique.blogspot.comNormal
21.bedroom-furniture-point.blogspot.comSpam
22.feezicles1.blogspot.comNormal
23.1cooking-school.blogspot.comSpam
24.lawswatch.blogspot.comNormal
25.stikkytin.blogspot.comSpam
26.plwdbgds.blogspot.comSpam
27.electricviolins.blogspot.comSpam
28.firsthealthplus.blogspot.comSpam
29.1healthmatters.blogspot.comSpam
30.kapital1.blogspot.comSpam
31.pariwariksuraksha.blogspot.comNormal
32.windmill-info.blogspot.comSpam
33.bringuptwins.blogspot.comSpam
34.xoygo.blogspot.comNormal
35.sisterhood8.blogspot.comNormal
36.souoecodemimmesma.blogspot.comNormal
37.247guide.blogspot.comSpam (looks like a spam blog in the making)
38.1fred.blogspot.comNormal
39.healthy-girl.blogspot.comSpam
40.hammersmithltd.blogspot.com?
41.allatvtires.blogspot.comSpam
42.nafisah-nuya.blogspot.comNormal
43.smalltonn.blogspot.comSpam
44.best-volkswagen-info.blogspot.comSpam
45.removedSpam
46.iamintodecorating.blogspot.comSpam
47.whereitgoesin.blogspot.comNormal
48.ahiestastu.blogspot.comNormal
49.mlb-daily.blogspot.comSpam
50.day-trading.blogspot.comNormal

30 bad ones out of 50 overall – that makes it around 60% spam on Blogspot. Google itself shows there are around 7,500,000 pages hosted on Blogspot. If we extrapolate the number, we might estimate Google is hosting 4 million spam pages. (Of course, this number is by no means in any way precise.)

Even though I expected some amount of spam, I was surprised just how much it is. From the small sample I took it looks like on average, a site hosted at Google’s Blogspot is more likely to contain spam than anything else. If you’d consider Blogspot a community, it would be a very unhealthy one. If you consider it just another free web hosting service, than the amount of spam still reflects badly on Google. As for those spam blogs which try to boost their Google rankings, it’s ironic that this is done on Google’s own servers. That’s as ridiculous as a cleaning lady with very dirty shoes.

Google reacted in partly by introducing Captchas for signing up, and by allowing users to flag content they find questionable. Could this be too little too late? And do they really expect users to flag thousands of spam pages – or do they want to get an idea of general patters that make up this spam, in order to automatically remove large portions of it?

Update: I added 50 100 tries to the sample above and now get a lower number of 63 spam blogs in 150 counted blogs, making for 42% spam on random Blogspot URLs. Like I said (and still) the number is by no means precise.

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!