Google Blogoscoped

Monday, November 14, 2005

Blogpulse Top List Spammed

How hard is it to create a good top blogs list? Apparently, very hard. Because creative spammers have the linkfarm weapon. And without good counter algorithms it’s hard to differentiate between a real popular blog, and a fake one.

The Blogpulse top 40 today is full of (not safe for work) porn spam blogs. Those include mainly ads and what might be automated content, plastered with “find a partner” links. Then, on all of these there are dozens of links into adult newsgroups (alt.binaries.*). Interestingly enough these blogs all look the same, and they’re all on Google’s Blogspot domain. Here’s a partial list of the “Splogpulse 40”:

And that’s by far not the end of it, but you get the idea.

Other blogs on the list include a bunch from Weblogs, Inc*. While not considered spam blogs, some might find the amount of 494 links on a 139-words post like this one to be leaning towards the linkfarmish. Are these links there for humans, or the Googlebot and his colleagues?

*Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc was also once accused of creating “best of” cross-posts to all of his blogs to boost the rankings in Technorati and other engines. In the comments to Nathan Weinberg’s post from October 15 (Nathan called the cross-posts a “gray area between link spam and editorial linking”), Jason replied, “If it was automated that would be kinda wrong I agree”, and in a later comment on that page admitted, “it must be automated now since itÂ’s going to the blogs which are not updated right now”. Jason later in the thread clarified that while the “best of” posts themselves were created by a human, the cross-posting to the different blogs in the Weblogs Inc network might be automated.

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