Blogger Hacks, Categories, Tips & Tricks

Monday, August 29, 2005
Blogspot's Spam Problems
are the rage in the blogosphere this week. Check out Google Blogoscoped:
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.


and the RSS Blog, where I ask in all seriousness... 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. This is a slightly bigger issue for Freshblog, too, because I've built this blog to the pinnacle of internet journalism (hah!) with tips and tricks for a service that might not love me back....

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!!

Immediate Update: So I clicked through 25 or so "next blogs" 'til I hit one that had the nav-bar disabled..., & I only flagged 5 blogs... 20%. Interestingly I only saw 4 different spam-blogs. One republished so fast that it showed up twice. Ouch!! So... Let's call 60% a high estimate and my 20% a low, based on time-of-day, & the random nature of the "next-blog" button. Still a significant enough issue to warrant a serious clean-up.

Filed in: , , , , , ,
Posted at 10:04 AM by John.
3 Comments:
<    >
Blogger RPM said...
And what about the blogs that are created as 'test' blogs and are not touched at all?

I am guilty of having a 'test' blog where I test out some template changes and stuff before I could do the same on my own blog.

Count those and the number of 'useless' blogs on blogspot is even higher!

<    >
Anonymous Anonymous said...
We sent out a press release yesterday via PRweb (http://www.prweb.com) which includes Google News in its distribution.

When we tracked the pickup on Clusty.com yesterday, we found we had seven blog pickups. Of the seven, six were splogs on blogspot that were aggregating keyword-rich content for AdSense revenue.

That's not a flattering percentage. And considering I have two of my own blogs on Blogger, I'm not happy about it either!!!

<    >
If someone flags a blogspot.com blog, then it no longer appears when you click Next Blog. From that, I would suggest that the actually number is closer to 60% than 20%. MHO.


eXTReMe Tracker