Google splogs are still thriving
After years and years of research, millions of dollars, and hiring of some of the most intelligent people on the web, Google still can’t stop the spam blogs from flooding its index.
This morning I woke up and started searching for information about the Wyoming GOP Caucus. I started with regular search, but the results were old, outdated, and some what irrelevant. Clearly the wonderful live search results I experienced Thursday night during the Iowa Caucus were not running things this morning. I then jumped to Google Blog Search and sorted the results by date.
Here is what I was met with.
In my opinion, it couldn’t be more clear these blogs are spam just by viewing the results. And there were tons of these results flooded the results for the past 45 minutes in the “sort by date” SERP’s.
Just for kicks, I clicked on a few to see what they were all about. Much to my surprise, these sploggers are stealing YouTube screenshots for profit. This is what one of the Splogs looked like.
Looks like a normal video post, right? Wrong. The video in the post is actually just an image that links to another page ripping YouTube’s design. None of the links work, and once again, if you click play on the video it just sends you to another page.
Notice the URL of this “YouTube” page.
http://gift-vip.net/videos/?name=wyoming+caucus
Once you click the video, you’re taken to a page that tries to force a file on you. My Linux Ubuntu system wouldn’t have any of it, but some other poor Windows user might not be so lucky.
Now, you might say these splogs aren’t really that many in number… well, apart from the obvious swarm of them hitting the results for Wyoming GOP Caucus, all one needs to do is look at the user profile for the splog mentioned above.
My question is… when you have a blogger profile that has MANY domains that look like this:
http://nhpollnlz65.blogspot.com/2008/01/wyoming-caucus.html
http://drzhivlsb26.blogspot.com/2008/01/wyoming-caucus.html
Wouldn’t it be easy to have some sort of red flag go up? I mean, if that isn’t obvious then I don’t know what is.
Come on Google, if you want the user experience to be solid, then get rid of this junk. It shouldn’t be that difficult.
