The spammers use programs to publish automatically (every 10 or 15 minutes : see the time of publication of the posts) and appear on this page.

Alright, so what is it that legitimate blogspot users can do here? As we all know, moving to a different URL is mighty tricky & undoes a lot of good inbounds, good work & goodwill.

Clicking through "next blog" & flagging seems like a drop in the bucket, if more than half of blogspot's 7,500,000 pages really are bad. Let's see where this goes... In the meantime, big bloggers, please remember the 40% of blogspot users who are legit!!

Thanks!!

http://blogfresh.blogspot.com/2005/08/blogspots-spam-problems.html

but this is exactly what the whole internet is like. nothing new here. Google's algorithms are thankfully mostly smarter than this – at least for stuff I look for.

31 and 32 are the same blog and next to 31 it is listed as normal and next to 32 it is listed as spam. What is up with this?

Thanks Eddie, this is corrected. I had copied the line and then didn't replace the correct spam URL.

I dont see how google can remove splogs without individually checking that each one is indeed a splog. i think what they should do is declare that blogspot pages have a pagerank of 0 until the problem is resolved

Perhaps we could think that as the splogs refresh their content a lot, is more easy to find them clicking "next blog". But we also could think that Google banned from weblogs.com and "next blog" directory some weblogs. So one for the other...

Caleb: that's easy for you to say, but punishes all legitimate BlogSpot users.

Philipp: how about making those into rel="nofollow" links so we can flag the spam blogs?

I have tried it also, however I have only 5 spam with 50 try gotten.

Yes, that number is not precise, but it is more important – and I think it is your real meaning – that it is an estimate that isn't necessarily "accurate."

You don't know if the number is right or wrong, really, no matter how many significant figures you give it. But it is a frightening estimate, isn't it? And you would think that Google would avoid evil a little more successfully, wouldn't you?

"-"

Okilee, after your comment I counted more blogs and the number is much lower this time. After 100 (50 + 50) blogs I've counted, I'm now getting 41% spam. I've updated the original article with a note. Following are the new URLs I've checked (some spam words altered):

1. your-XXX-refinance.blogspot.com – Spam
2. querosercronista.blogspot.com – Normal
3. tos-ccc.blogspot.com – Spam
4. furnituregallery14.blogspot.com – Spam
5. shadowx99.blogspot.com – Normal
6. instable-art.blogspot.com – Normal
7. wageringfootball5225.blogspot.com – Spam (not quite as automated, it seems, but keyword stuffing and such)
8. googplex.blogspot.com – Spam
9. googplex.blogspot.com – Spam
10. chicagorealestatesourceinfo.blogspot.com – Spam
11. jonnasays.blogspot.com – Normal
12. bluefireclay.blogspot.com – Normal
13. wwwjackbenimble.blogspot.com – Normal
14. music-videos-daily.blogspot.com – Spam
15. fotoescrita.blogspot.com – Normal
16. chrishartman.blogspot.com – Normal
17. saltandice.blogspot.com – Normal
18. niqabified.blogspot.com – Normal
19. kmabney.blogspot.com – Normal
20. jhenwood.blogspot.com – Normal
21. uhohnowlook.blogspot.com – Normal
22. descarnado.blogspot.com – Normal
23. oqueaindanaoescrevi.blogspot.com – Normal
24. dewchic7894.blogspot.com – Normal
25. u2katrina.blogspot.com – Normal
26. callistergreen.blogspot.com – Normal
27. bandoneonarrabalero.blogspot.com – Normal
28. meierblog.blogspot.com – Normal
29. enlacaja.blogspot.com – Normal
30. maccocella.blogspot.com – Normal
31. monkeydonot.blogspot.com – Normal
32. my-chemical-romance-daily.blogspot.com – Spam
33. jrh1972.blogspot.com – Normal
34. opinionlibrosnoticias.blogspot.com – Normal
35. oraclesponge.blogspot.com – Normal
36. minfanteg.blogspot.com – Normal
37. underestimatedlady.blogspot.com – Normal
38. novocaine-03.blogspot.com – Normal
39. annarborroadscholars.blogspot.com – Normal
40. meuegoaqui.blogspot.com – Normal
41. octavo-dia.blogspot.com – Normal
42. apokalupto.blogspot.com – Normal
43. soldiernoah.blogspot.com – Normal
44. cambalhotas.blogspot.com – Normal
45. deansworld.blogspot.com – Normal
46. lefthookradio.blogspot.com – Normal
47. minutopolitico.blogspot.com – Normal
48. saltdogs.blogspot.com – Spam?
49. kapuso.blogspot.com – Normal
50. coloradorealestatesourceinfo.blogspot.com – Spam

I have to say to get any even remotely precise value, I might need to test around 1,000 blogs. If some of you want to help, please test 50 blogs and post your results (not the URLs, just the number) here.

As for ways Google could automatically defend against this spam – actually, it might not be as hard for certain types of spam (this is not to say spammers wouldn't adjust their algorithms to counter-attack). For example, many spam blogs always post in defined frequencies (11:04, 1:04, 3:04 and so on).

50 more counted, and that'll be all from me – the number's now at 42% spam.

1. vacuumhome.blogspot.com – Spam
2. robertsinbox.blogspot.com – Normal
3. donateacaronline.blogspot.com – Spam
4. alwaysnurul.blogspot.com – Normal
5. www.perdahlberg.com – Normal
6. breast-enhancement-mini1.blogspot.com – Spam
7. lyrics4me.blogspot.com – Normal
8. scc-crusaders.blogspot.com – Normal
9. yoursportssource2005.blogspot.com – Spam
10. daily-biotechnology-news.blogspot.com – ?
11. accidentattorneyfinder.blogspot.com – Spam
12. discount-seals-online.blogspot.com – Spam
13. lahabitaciondelduende.blogspot.com – Normal
14. justadremear.blogspot.com – Normal
15. acrazywriter.blogspot.com – ?
16. limppickle.blogspot.com – Normal
17. lahabitaciondelduende.blogspot.com – ?
18. lysne.blogspot.com – Normal
19. aringtone4us.blogspot.com – Spam
20. edmundchow.blogspot.com – Normal
21. marijayde.blogspot.com – Normal
22. igotsmethingtosay.blogspot.com – Normal
23. hotels-easy.blogspot.com – Spam
24. compatiblewith.blogspot.com – Spam
25. conference-mini2.blogspot.com – Spam
26. love-computers.blogspot.com – Spam
27. bradsbrain.blogspot.com – Normal
28. stockssight.blogspot.com – Spam
29. towellie.blogspot.com – Normal
30. healthcare-and-news.blogspot.com – Spam?
31. dcfoodblog.blogspot.com – Normal
32. lookingatthem.blogspot.com – Normal
33. thailand-mini2.blogspot.com – Spam
34. babyproducts1.blogspot.com – Spam
35. get-saab-info.blogspot.com – Spam
36. canihavealife.blogspot.com – Normal
37. alwaysnurul.blogspot.com – Normal
38. cgoesmexico.blogspot.com – Normal
39. insurance-mini22.blogspot.com – Spam
40. dental-insurance-44502.blogspot.com – Spam
41. girdlesgdb.blogspot.com – Spam
42. felixion.blogspot.com – Normal
43. goog-ipo.blogspot.com – Spam?
44. libnys.blogspot.com – Normal
45. nappydiatribe.blogspot.com – Normal
46. manawo1.blogspot.com – Normal
47. mydordrecht.blogspot.com – Spam
48. prime-time-links.blogspot.com – Normal
49. bfaw.blogspot.com – Normal
50. self-improvement-123.blogspot.com – Spam

In some splogs, Google is involved in all 4 parts of the scheme:

1. People searching in Google...
2. arrive at a blog hosted at Google's Blogspot...
3. to find automated blog posts fired by Google News alerts...
4. and they end up clicking on Google AdSense.

So can we assume that 60% of blogs are splogs? So all those numbers being thrown around about the number of blogs in the world is false? Most probably yes.

Look at feedster for example. It says:
"13,478,310 feeds indexed and fully searchable"

Feeds are not neccesarily blog feeds.. could be website feeds... etc...

Let's say after we remove those feeds, we get 9,000,000 feeds.

60% of those feeds are spam.

Most of the blogs have more than one feed, RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, RSS 0.90, ATOM etc... Are blog search engines also crawling those feeds?

You can clearly see that there aren't 13 million blogs....

In my opinion there are less than 1 million blogs... Yes, my opinion...

Don't believe those statistics. They sound like a big load of BS to me.

I don't believe those stats either. I once had the option to subscribe to RSS search feeds at FindForward.com, for any kind of search. That would make the site potentially have an infinite number of RSS feeds...

As for the exact number, after the additional 100 blogs I've counted I would downsize it to about 40%. And that's just Blogspot, which might (or not) have a larger than average amount of blogs.

I've been trawling the googlesphere and found much the same numbers. On the plus side: if there's about 40% spam blogs than means there's 60% legit blogs. If every real blogger would go around and flag a few blogs that should have some impact on google?

I just flagged my 10 spam blogs, how about you?

Hosting a blog on Blogspot is a free service, so why not stop the ability to post to blogs hosted on Blogspot via the Blogger API and then introduce a captcha for every post and comment hosted on Blogspot?

Admittedly, webspace is cheap – but at least then you could do a WHOIS on the spammer's domain name if you wanted to find out who they were.

Be sure to rememeber to report spam blogs or splogs to Splog Reporter at http://www.splogreporter.com and help clean up the blogosphere.

My concern is that what is the criteria for deciding what blog is splog and what blog is legitimate.

I have a blog called my google adsense lab and I wrote about this today. Many of you may find my blog to be "splog".

On the other hand, others of you looking for useful info on google adsense may find it helpful.

So how do we decide what is splog and what is not?

(As I've told you via email, my definition for splot is in the article.)

BlogShares has encountered its highest concentration of spam sites from blogspot.com urls, second to none. Given months of improving our spam blocking and detection, I'd guestimate that 60% of new blogs seem to be spam from that domain, which overall is ? There were a couple million legit blogspot blogs up and running before the spammers really caught on, so I guess it really depends how and when you measure.

Regardless of whether we're talking 40% or 60%, the point that should be emphasized is that spam prevention has apparently slipped awfully low on the priority list at blogspot and Blogger. With a bit of work, and some minimal discovery, 90% of this spam could be blocked at the source.

Amen. Moving my blog to Xanga with the preteens is starting to look like an attractive option.

These days too many people are saying blogspot is too doomed by spam blogs to have the right to exist anymore. It’s kind of like everybody seeing a broken house, and then they all tried to push the whole house down. But in fact this is not a broken house by all means, especially in google’s plan. If you hate blogspot so much that you want to kill the whole thing off, don’t forget there’s millions of innocent and talented bloggers out there are passionately creating some real good stuff on blogspot. Don’t forget blogspot has done an enormous job to let the voice of third world heard, see Baghdad Burning, The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog, etc. Those people are so poor that some people can live a year on the kind of money some western people pays for typepad or similar just for blogging. Blogspot is very generous to third world bloggers. Wait for those poor people all having enough food, house to live, and water to drink, and then all having kind of money western people have for holiday, alcohol, etc, and if they still want to blog, they’ll sign up for typepad or whatever. Until then, what’s the best choice for third world people to let the world hear their voice other than blogspot. When google bought blogspot and offered it for free, many people think google are crazy, but blogspot stays free since and has been widely enjoyed by millions of serious bloggers out there. What’s those voice about: blogspot is rotten, and is doomed,blah,blah? If you ban, ban, ban, just ban as you wish the whole blogspot domain, how many innocent and meaningful voices is going to die in the silence.

People are fighting for spam for ages, spam emails---say if you received a spam email from hotmail, would you ask for Microsoft to kill off the whole hotmail dormain, spam blogs, and spam website. Has spam ever stopped existing? No! It will never! Cause it’s part of internet as an ecosystem. If you want to kill off spam totally, fine, disconnect your computer from internet. Ban the whole world wide web then!

The point is that we have heard enough of how evil blogspot has become. ---I know the hatred to blogspot isn’t very healthy now. If you want to help, please come up with some solution instead of damonlizing blogspot, otherwise you can shut up!

Spam blog is not only existing on blogspot! And if you see blogspot hosting spam blogs is such a hot headline in current blog atmosphere, you follow up to write some similar post as well, maybe you can increase number of hits on your blog, but where’s the solution instead of doing a follow-up cat? 1000 people describe how worse the situation can’t add up to a man who comes up with a solution!

Levisu, who wants to shut down Blogspot? I don't quite get it. As for my article, I only then analyzed (and realized) how big a spam problem Blogspot has. As for a solution, I think Google might tackle portions of it by filtering patterns of automated content, I've mentioned this before.

Mark Cuban had threatened removing .blogspot.com sites from IceRocket. I have not heard anyone come out and say directly "lets get blogger shut down" but I have heard people talk about getting .blogspot.com sites removed from search indexes and spidering. That is what worries me.

Philipp, no matter what intension your post is, we should be in this fight against together.I think that google now do take this issue seriously. That's why they added flag button on navbar. Even it's not a good solution, but at least it's a good beginning against spam. But in the mean time,we shouldn't discriminate bloggers from blogspot just because of the situation we now have. Cause this kind of discrimination is the same as racism. Like some people come from a country where the country is flooded with crime,rottenness and lack of kind of western democracy and they are discriminated by some self-superior rich country people. That's just not right and won't help stop spams.As for Mark Cuban, I think he goes to too extreme with this one. Broadcast.com is Yahoo! most failure aquire ever and made Mark cuban a super rich kid just in one night. IceRocket is just another toy for him after Dallas Mavericks. The way how he wants to play with his new toy is up to him, excluded blogspot from it, I don't worry about that, cause there are loads of nice blog search engine out there I can choose!

Looks like Blogger have tried to do something about the spam:

http://buzz.blogger.com/2005/09/next-blog-now-with-less-spam.html

Heh, interesting but hardy suprising. I suppose it just goes to show that content still is king huh? :) There are many ways of getting visitors to your site, but very few good ones for long-term readerships. My guess is that most of the splotting (that the wording of it?) done on blogspot and similar communities(?) are just that; short term attempts to get a visitor or two. And as for the ridiculous amounts of that-not-to-be-mantioned-in-a-blog-comment-card-game ads i get in my comments every week – all sites that could potentially drive any real audience to those sites use spam protection.

Hi Phil, I worked on link spammers and I think I find a good way to automaticly detect them, you can see it here

http://phpmagazine.net/antispam/

Keyword spammer are not detected here, am still work in it and I'll post about both as soon as I finish

It does look like Blogger has made some logic changes to the Next Blog function to eliminate the chances of gettting a splog. Running through 120 blogs earlier, I found zero splogs in the sites presented.

Of course, this is mostly cosmetic and for the general blog reader. It has done nothing to stem splog production. Downline recipients of pings from new splogs are still seeing tons of new listings from blogspot with no sign of any slowdown.

More followup here:

http://islanddave.blogzy.com/home/2005/09/5703.html

I've make it online, it will be great to hear your feedbacks

http://www.antisplog.net/

am a spammer ;P , jk, some people ,just use blogsite for their search engine ranking! Blogsite is one of SEO's powerfultool.

I'm jazzed that you happened on my blog bfaw.blogspot.com and found it to be normal! The site is in itself a "best friend at work"

www.bloxster.net is much better service to get a free blog from then blogger. There is always something wrong at blogger. My free weblog from bloxster is never down and has lots of cool features.