Google Addresses Blogger Splog Spam Blog Issue
Splogs became an overnight horror with the launch of thousands of search results and aggregator clogging spam blogs last weekend. For the most part, Google’s Blogger has been a target of Sploggers due to its “easy to spam” blog building service. Robots were building thousands of spam blogs via Blogger by automated services, despite minimal anti-spam methods used by Blogger.
Blogger has since built more spam blog barriers based on the characted recognition CAPTCHA method, and integrated such into most aspects of publishing blogs which are suspected of being splogs.
Jason Goldman of Blogger posted on BloggerBuzz:
Today we are posting a revised version of the word verification system we released yesterday. With this version we have resolved a number of the problems from the initial launch – the most important of which was the inability of some users to solve the CAPTCHAs presented.
There should also be fewer false positives. However, as I mentioned earlier, with any automatic classification of spam there will be some legitimate content that gets classified incorrectly.
It’s important to know that if you are prompted to solve the CAPTCHA, it doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with your blog. Because of the number of variables our classifier uses, there’s no easy way for us to pinpoint why your blog may have tripped the word verification (publicizing this information also serves to defeat the classifier).
The number of false positives will affect only a small percentage of the overall Blogger community. However, I know that for those of you asked to answer the word verification that this is a true inconvenience and for that I apologize.
More insight on how Google is identifying splogs, Amit of Digital Inspiration is following the anti-splog measures of Blogger “Using some unknown algorithm, Google has identified some Blogger users as “spam robots” who must go through the word verification process if they want to create or edit a post.”
