I understand that some jackass dropped a Splogbomb generated by blogspot.com today. For those that are new to the internets, splogs are websites with blog URLs, frequently blogspot.com URLs such as the one for this website, that are cloned (i.e. no written value by the creator) and used for spamming. They are started by computer scripts and continually post ads, send out comments to other blogs, clog up search engine results and other such annoying nonsense.
The splogbomb that came today was the result of some spammer that wrote a computer script that continually generates thousands of new blogs and pings out millions of posts about cheap Viagra, mortgage rates, etc. It originated at blogger.com, the website for all blogspot.com blogs. And that is not surprising, because this Google-hosted blog site is easy, fast, and free. Thus you have the most spammers starting splogs here.
Why do we care? Because blogs are indexed by Google, Icerocket, and other sites so that when people search the internet for content that is covered in your blog, it turns up as a result. Now, these engines are starting to refuse to index new blog posts because the staggering amount of splogs are drowning the search engines in useless results.
What is the solution? Make it harder to post on your blog. For example, I write my post, save it to the blog, and then get an email confirmation that requires me to click on a link to publish the post. Or install some kind of filter that requires an extra step to log in and post.
Mark Cuban's excellent blog covers this topic today, and is where I got some of the above info. He runs Icerocket.com and is a great member of the blog community. His engine is not indexing any blogspot.com posts until the problem has been fixed.
Cuban is right in his post today: Google has provided a great service to those of us who aren't very computer savvy but want to run a free, accessible blog such as this one. But when you allow your site to host literally tens of thousands of splogs that cripple people's ability to use the blogosphere to exchange ideas and information, you should install whatever filter is necessary to curb that practice. Let's get our act together here.
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