Who Cares How Many Discs Counterfeit Operation Could Have Made?

Google Can't Figure Out That Its Own Blog Isn't Spam

from the whoops dept

Thu, Aug 9th 2007 12:31am — Carlo Longino

Splogs have been a problem for a while now. Spammers set up sites full of content -- generally stolen from legitimate sites -- in order to grab search traffic and make money from ads or through other means. Blog platform providers don't want to waste resources supporting these sites, so many of them have some form of anti-splog system, including Google's Blogspot platform. But clearly they need more work, since Blogspot's marked an official Google blog as spam (via Infoworld), leading to its disappearance and the takeover of its URL by another blogger. Apparently the system's warning emails to the Google bloggers went unheeded, so after a period of time, the site was automatically taken down, and another blogger swooped in and grabbed the URL. The company realized what happened, and restored the site, but the episode highlights just how poorly anti-spam blog systems tend to work.

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Filed Under: spam, splogs
Companies: google

11 Comments

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 9 Aug 2007 @ 1:23am

Anybody else noticed...
...that "blogspot" is an anagram of "splogbot"?
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lbsterling, 9 Aug 2007 @ 3:05am

Re: Anybody else noticed...
No, but your name anagrams pretty well too!

-A Cowed Virile Loner
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Squeaky, 9 Aug 2007 @ 3:38am

Re: Re: Anybody else noticed...
Harsh but damned funny
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MEoip, 9 Aug 2007 @ 4:37am

huh?
Let me get this straight Google's spam bot removed their blog so the spam bot is broken.
Wait... It appears that Google didn't answer the email they were sent or bother to log into blogger and see they were a suspected splog. So I'm guessing like many folks they use some sort of app that posts from Word or OO or somewhere else. This ain't the bots fault it's the blogger's fault for not paying attention or logging into his/her blog.
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Jim (profile), 9 Aug 2007 @ 6:07am

Everything worked perfectly
if the site was not being maintained and simply feed news so that people would visit.
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anagrammer, 9 Aug 2007 @ 6:21am

Re: Re: Anybody else noticed...
it could be "Weirdo or evil clean" as well.
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Nathan Weinberg, 9 Aug 2007 @ 9:21am

Re:
Also, this episode highlights just how poorly Googlers respond to email.
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Neal, 9 Aug 2007 @ 9:32am

Har Har
I couldn't help but laugh. Google identifies one of it's own blogs as spam and deletes it but it can't seem to recognize the (seemingly) 90% of blogspot blogs that actually are spam blogs to delete them (or remove them from its blog search).
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Aug 2007 @ 10:10am

Re: Re:
Not really. It highlights how one person failed to respond to emails.
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Anonymous Googler, 9 Aug 2007 @ 5:22pm

sorry, the email must have come in while i was taking my daily chateau y'quem bath or while i was lighting a pre-castro cuban with a $1,000 bill.
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A Key, 28 Nov 2007 @ 9:57am

Google Judgments
The bigger the dog, the more chance it will bite its own tail. It's inevitable.
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