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Splogs Clog Blog Services

Posted by Hemos on from the like-LDLs dept.

SuperWebTech writes "A new generation of spam has emerged lately in the form of automatically-created spam blogs, or "splogs." One wily programmer manipulated Blogger's API to create a "spamalanche" of thousands of blogs whose sole purpose was to increase their real sites' pagerank. This clogged search engine results while filling RSS feed services with useless listings. Though Google, Blogger's owner, is doing its best to fix the problem, in the meantime several services have stopped listing any site they host. So far nobody has found a solution."

4 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. They even quote you sometimes by digitalgimpus · · Score: 3, Informative

    In hopes of not looking so spammy, they will take real blogs, and either copy the contents, or just key words (such as authors name and perhaps post title.

    So when you search for something... spammers with your name come up, rather than yourself.

  2. splogs aren't the problem... by ianmassey · · Score: 4, Informative

    The problem surfaces when the "splogs" are used to comment spam and trackback spam legitimate blogs. It's through these links that PageRank is increased. If everyone starts proactively dealing with spam on their own sites, this problem will solve itself. MovableType users can upgrade to 3.2, which has spam blocking features, or use the great plugin MT-Blacklist. Either will eliminate this problem. An AC mentioned that WordPress has a similar set of options. I know that TypePad does. The only major blog service provider left to come up with a solution is Blogger, and in the interim you can require registration to post comments on your Blogger site or turn comments off entirely. LiveJournal and all the clones are blocked from trackback by 90% of normal blog sites already, so they don't even count.

    Another poster suggested that we ignore this problem, and it will go away. Untrue. Ignoring the 600 spam comments a day is exactly what the spammers would prefer you do, so that they can stink up every site on the internet with their crap. We are fortunate that in the case of this "new" form of spam, the tools necessary to get rid of it are already there and effective, we just need to get them all turned on.

  3. Word verification is obsolete by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative
    Word verification is obsolete.
    • Programs have been written that can successfully decode capchas most of the time. It turns out not to be too hard to modify OCR programs to do this.
    • Word verification can be outsourced to third world countries at low cost.
    • Most cleverly, word verification can outsourced to users of your porno sites, who have to type in soneone else's capcha to get free pictures.

    All these approaches are in active use.

  4. Re:Word verification? by Myself · · Score: 3, Informative

    If someone's willing to pay for a higher search ranking, the spammer can pay humans to beat the CAPTCHAs. I can see it now, a sweatshop in a low-wage country with hundreds of workers monotonously typing in the text from the skewed and scrambled images.

    There's also PWNTcha, a CAPTCHA decoder. (Previously slashdotted.)