Journal: News & Comment

Ground under the boot

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Here's a list of the 13,155 spam blogs ("splogs") hosted on Blog*Spot that Blogger deleted over the weekend.

I see some of these blogs because I use services such as Feedster, Technorati, PubSub, and IceRocket, as well as the new meta-search Gada.be, to see up-to-date results on who's writing about "penmachine" or "Derek K. Miller" or "Derek Miller" or "Navarik," my employer. Recently, many of the results have been from splogs, which use soups of random links and excerpts to try to get traffic and PageRank and ad revenue, all while cluttering up the Web with their crap.

My search feeds do seem a lot cleaner today—some of the spam blogs that were using "penmachine" or "derek miller" in their pages a few days ago are already gone, which is a good sign. For some reason, though, a supposed "Vancouver Hotels" spam blog that has persisted for months (and which excerpts some of my material as part of its stream-of-unconsciousness attempt to game Google) still isn't gone, even though I keeping flagging it to Blogger.

 |