RSS and Blog Spam: A Losing Battle?

+ Posted by Josh Hallett on 05.02.05 // 08:14 PM

Gee it only seems like yesterday that I started seeing blog spam. The problem is getting worse, much worse. Are we fighting a losing battle?

This evening I did a search on Technorati for Lakeland Florida. Of the 20 results on the first screen, 10 were from spam blogs, 50%. I know I can e-mail feedback@technorati.com and submit the URLs of the spam blogs for removal, but why bother when 10 more will start up tomorrow?

The same search on Feedster shows 14 results with 12 of them being spam, a whopping 86%. I figured that changing the result sort to relevance rather than date would improve the results, nope. The results are somewhat different, but it's still 12 or 14, or 86%.

A few of the keywords I monitor via PubSub are almost useless now since they mostly return spam blogs. The majority of spam blogs I see are hosted on Blogger. No surprise there since it's free and the registration process is quick and easy.

What's the solution? Technorati is removing offending blogs from their databases, but how effective can that be? The other issue is what exactly constitutes a spam blog? There is the 'you know it when you see it/glaringly obvious' standard, but sometimes it might not be that easy to tell. For now PubSub is taking a hands-off approach.

It's frustrating when you are showing newbies the power of blogs and tools like Technorati, and your search results are mostly spam. You can just see the non-believers saying to themselves, "see I told you all the blog stuff was junk."

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» Search Spam That's Coming... (Time-based) from Genuine VC
We all know about search engine spam. Wikipedia defines it using the coined term “spamdexing” as, “the practice of deliberately and dishonestly modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engi... [Read More]

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