Confederacy of a Dunce - Real blogs and spamblogs

Thursday, August 18, 2005

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An awful lot of the blogs I read on a regular or semi-regular basis are on Blogspot (now run by Google). One of them features a "Random blog" link which sends the clicker off to a mystery blog selected (apparently) at random from the whole mess. And mess it is: I followed it a couple of times and was a bit disturbed to find so many "spam blogs" among them.

They're quite easy to spot; their typical content is something like this:

Art And Craft Ideas Corks -

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posted by *****fazscom at 8:46 AM 0 comments
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posted by *****fazscom at 8:31 AM 0 comments

Their names often contain random letter stings (e.g. fazscom), and/or product names (e.g. towelsite), and/or numbers, usually have no customization, and the default links still appear:
* Google News
* Edit-Me
* Edit-Me

These spamblogs are (I guess) intended to boost Google rankings of their underlying site (see this article for an interesting analysis and comment-discussion), perhaps in a nigritude ultramarine sort of way, or else trick browsers into visiting their site. To a large extent they seem automatically generated (although I guess human intervention is now required in order to create a blog). I wondered how common such blogs are within the Blogspot sphere, so I did a little experiment with the random blog link. I clicked it 100 times to see what came up (discounting any repetitions that occurred, if any). Of course I have no way of knowing that the sample is random, but this gives an impression of the proportion of spamblogs out there.

Of the 100 tests, 39 of them were spamblogs (including the following "themes": Adult, Ammunition, Australia travel, Belts, Broker Mortgage, Cells, Christian dating, College, Cosmetic x2, Craft, Credit, Diaper, Disease sites, Fashion, Football, Healthcare products, Home Builder, Laser hair removal, Line of credit, Mortgage x2, Notes, Paris travel, Pasadena travel, Plus size, Pottery, Reality TV, Recipe, Sports Supplement, Stock, Tennessee, Tools, Transportation, Used treadmills, plus four miscellaneous junk sites with various content but clearly of a spam blog type).

The 61 "real" blogs were of various quality (including 10 blogs with only a single post more than a month old, but which were noticeably written by humans. Usually to say "Like everyone else I know, I am going to start blogging now, and this is my blog"). But this gives me a rough estimate of the proportion of blogspot blogs that are spammy, call it 40%. Is this a problem? I'm not sure, as the only way I come across them is by the random search, or occasionally they will turn up when I search blogs using Technorati (but it's quite clear that they are spammy; I need not follow a link to "Weight Loss Plans Weight Loss Plans Information About Weight Loss Plans click on this link to discover how good nutrition can help with dieting and weight lossNutrition advice Atkins Diet Best Fat Burners Cabbage Soup Diet Calories Counting Calories Diabetes Diet Diabetic Diet Diet Pills Diet Pill" when I am looking for a [real] blog that discusses "cabbage soup" [I somehow doubt I would take this route, however, with Epicurious just around the corner]). Surely they must be useful in some way to the designers; I'm just not sure how.

Although I didn't spend any time reading the "real" blogs that jumped out at me, I have to mention the blog of celticwanderlust, whose last entry happened to refer to our next holiday destination (just a few days): No, the Germans haven't bombed London again. It's much, much worse. The British have invaded Tallinn!!! Stag parties are terrorising this town, holding it hostage with there need to to be drunk, naked and loud all at the same time! I became used to this when the british invaded dublin (as if 900 years wasn't enough) and destroyed our pub and club culture....

We'll have to see if we manage to avoid the invasion; we're mostly after history and food (and definitely not being simultaneously drunk, naked and loud).

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Thursday, August 18, 2005 9:51:06 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)