Blogspot's Spam Problems

are the rage in the blogosphere this week. Check out Google Blogoscoped:
30 bad ones out of 50 overall � that makes it around 60% spam on Blogspot. Google itself shows there are around 7,500,000 pages hosted on Blogspot. If we extrapolate the number, we might estimate Google is hosting 4 million spam pages. (Of course, this number is by no means in any way precise.)

Even though I expected some amount of spam, I was surprised just how much it is. From the small sample I took it looks like on average, a site hosted at Google�s Blogspot is more likely to contain spam than anything else.


and the RSS Blog, where I ask in all seriousness... what is it that legitimate blogspot users can do here? As we all know, moving to a different URL is mighty tricky & undoes a lot of good inbounds, good work & goodwill. This is a slightly bigger issue for Freshblog, too, because I've built this blog to the pinnacle of internet journalism (hah!) with tips and tricks for a service that might not love me back....

Clicking through "next blog" & flagging seems like a drop in the bucket, if more than half of blogspot's 7,500,000 pages really are bad. Let's see where this goes... In the meantime, big bloggers, please remember the 40% of blogspot users who are legit!! Thanks!!

Immediate Update: So I clicked through 25 or so "next blogs" 'til I hit one that had the nav-bar disabled..., & I only flagged 5 blogs... 20%. Interestingly I only saw 4 different spam-blogs. One republished so fast that it showed up twice. Ouch!! So... Let's call 60% a high estimate and my 20% a low, based on time-of-day, & the random nature of the "next-blog" button. Still a significant enough issue to warrant a serious clean-up.

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