75% of Google's Blogspot Blogs are Spam

Busarus · #1 (**permalink**) 20-03-2007, 09:30 PM

75% of Google's Blogspot Blogs are Spam

On a recurring theme of Internet spam, a study discussed in WebmasterWorld indicates that three out of four blogs -- or 75% -- are spam.
According to the study (PDF link):

...14 of the top-15 doorway domains have a spam percentage higher than 74%; that is, 3 out of 4 unique URLs on these domains (that appeared in our search results) were detected as spam. To demonstrate the need for scrutinizing these sites, we scanned the top-1000 results from two queries – “site:blogspot.com phentermine” and “site:hometown.aol.com ringtone” – and identified more than half of the URLs as spam easily.

Here is a chart from the study showing the "top doorway domains and their spam percentages (among the search results in our data)":

The reason for this is the suspicion that the popular blogging service is free. One WebmasterWorld member states:

The trouble is, there's no algorithm that can automatically factor in the price of a service. It's free to set up a blog on Blogger, so it can be abused more easily. If these spammers actually had to pay for a new domain name every time they set up a splog, they wouldn't bother.

Other findings of this research showed the spam percentages for Top-Level Domains (TLDs):

68% of .info TLDs are spam
53% of .biz TLDs are spam
12% of .net TLDs are spam
11% of .org TLDs are spam
4.1% of .com TLDs are spam

Busarus · #2 (**permalink**) 20-03-2007, 09:32 PM

on the tld domain issue, I do not allow registration for my boards from the following as experience has shown that we get a huge amoount of spam from them

.biz
.cc
.fm
.info
.nu
.ru
.su
.ua
.uz
.lv
.pl
.ws
.by

Gavin · #3 (**permalink**) 20-03-2007, 10:14 PM

Funny how Google claim to be on a constant battle against spam but yet their blogging service produces so much of it. A good start for them would be to pull the plug on the lot or at least run it like wordpress where the blog code is not hackable.

I know of one self claimed SEO person who has over 100 blogspot blogs that are nothing but a huge ring of linked blogs. The only purpose of the blogs is to sell links.

blacknight · #4 (**permalink**) 21-03-2007, 01:06 AM

It's like with email spam.

The ISPs with the strictest blocks seem to be the sources of the most spam

Gmail is a lovely case in point.

They harp on about how great their spam filtering is yet they also harbour a silly number of spammers AND due to their demented implementation of email headers it's impossible to see the true source IP of an email!

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