Google Reacts to Splogs

labnol writes "Recently, Mark Cuban of Icerocket made the accusation that Blogger is by far the worst offender when it comes to Spam Blogs. Now Google Blogger is introducing Word Verification for user comments to prevent comment spam and another feature called Flag As Objectionable where users can report blogs with questionable content. Google appears to be listening."

Comments

Re:good for google

[croddy]

No, this is not about reducing spam in the comments on blogs. This is about reducing the number of blogs whose authors post only spam. The number of such blogs is enormous -- most counts put it between half and 2/3.

Re:Does anybody really care...

[macklin01]

Distorted google rankings (and accordingly worsened search results), that's why. -- Paul

Re:good for google

[blinksilver]

Off the above link "We've just introduced the option to require word verification for comments. This option (off by default) gives bloggers a tool to prevent the automatic creation of comments by nefarious ne'er-do-wells (e.g. spammers). Features like comment captcha and flag as objectionable are not complete solutions to the problem of spam. But they are additional tools that can help address it." I may just be missing something but what is word verification about then if not to stop spammer (bots) from leaving unwanted comments?

Oh yeah

[dedazo]

Blogspot is overflowing with these. Take a look at this this for example(don't want to go there with IE, BTW), or this one or this one.

If you use the 'next blog' randomizing feature on blogs you'll see that roughly one out of five 'blogs' are nothing but link farms, worm repositories and bullshit like that.

And this has been going on for quite a while. We all know that Google has a fondness for indexing Blogger content rather quickly, and so do the spammers. It's about time the company did something about it.

Re:I can see it now..

[techno-vampire]

There's a way to keep people from using Mark as Objectionable to censor political opinions. You have to be logged in to mark, and the blog keeps track of who it is making the mark. Whoever owns the blog can go over the marks, remove any inappropriate ones and, if somebody's abusing the privilege, eject them. Of course, there has to be a way to keep them from simply signing up again, such as checking for a banned email address. Yes, I know how easy it is to create throw-away addresses, but it might slow them down a little.