Forum Moderators: mack
Anyone brave enough to type "cheap tickets" in a search engine can find a plethora of one-page Web sites designed to drive traffic to other Web sites and generate click-through advertising revenue.Three out of every four unique Blogspot.com URLs that appeared in the top 50 results for commercial queries were spam, the study said. Blogspot is the hosting site for Google's blogging service. Blogs created for marketing purposes are sometimes referred to as "splogs."
Deja Vu - nice study - I liked it the first time I read it nine years ago in 1998 when Altavista said near the exact same thing. Pokemon forever!
I predict you are wrong, at least as far as Google is concerned. Blogger Splogs are a problem but I doubt Google will throw the baby out with the bath water. And it wouldn't even be logical to do so for a couple of reasons. For one thing, there are thousands of valid blogs hosted by blogspot that offer unique, firsthand content. Secondly, of the blogspot blogs that are splogs, very few rank for anything.
The splog problem is analogous to the MFA website problem. And I think Google will simply continue to take the same approach as always: filter out the spam and include relevant content in the serps.
"They should call it SPAMSPOT instead"
And they should call 95 percent of the sites that use adsense the "spamsense noncontent network".
""Ultimately, it is advertisers' money that is funding the search spam industry, which is increasingly cluttering the Web with low-quality content and reducing Web users' productivity,"
No doubt. And though the article used orbitz as an example, most of this can probably be laid at the feet of adsense.
Why anyone would type "cheap tickets" without some sort of qualifier I don't know? Maybe this is why Microsoft has so much trouble getting search?
heh!
Also, one domain-- topsearch10.com-- hosted many other redirection domains that were responsible for 22 percent to 25 percent of the spam detected during the researchers' tests, the study said.
Wow... that's a lot
Maybe Google has an advantage of blocking these blogs because they know the IP's or the private data of the people holding the accounts internally since they own them.
Maybe Google has an advantage of blocking these blogs because they know the IP's or the private data of the people holding the accounts internally since they own them
Or maybe Google gives them a free pass.
Do ya think?
[cs.ucdavis.edu...]
The concluding section contains an analysis of problems at the different layers of the researchers 5 layer, double funnel model.
The layer 4 analysis says,
"For Layer #4 – syndicators, we discovered that a handful of ads syndicators appeared to serve as the middlemen for connecting advertisers with the majority of the spammers. In particular, the top-3 syndicators were involved in 59-68% of the spam-ads clickthrough
redirection chains that we sampled. By serving ads on a large number of low-quality spam pages at potentially lower prices, these syndicators could become major competitors to main-stream advertising companies who serve some of the same advertisers’ ads on earch-result pages and other high-quality, non-spam pages."
Does that sound like a classic case of "dumping" to anyone? I mean that in terms of classic international trade theory. A country, or in this case, a syndicator, dumps goods at lower prices (i.e., text ads) in other countries, or in this case, many blogs, as a strategy to hurt their main stream advertising competitors.
After the main stream competitors start to lose steam (or possibly go out of business), the syndicators are in a much better position to raise their rates and capture a greater (if not monopolistic) market share.
There was also a notable remark at section 2.3
"Although some spammers have abused the AdSense program [28], the abuse is most likely the exception rather than the norm."
Do most people at WW find that to be true, there is not an unusually large amount of spam on adsense?
then i went to look at Goo.... searched for the same thing, ended up om someones BLOG whos favorite book is "Lord of the Rings" hhmmmm
Then I searched Goo... for mydomainname.tld +blogspot
and found a link to a cached log of "PArsing and processing " data thrue guest books of some spammer whos server is located in FR but the main page is in RU lang. and where they are asking to transfer 1000K from paypal. In any event there is a list of PRoXIES and Botnet Effected machines(IPs), about 80 of them, so that will keep me busy with some research...
Well Yahoo posts on their site about how MSN is talking about Googles Spam. Doesn't that sound like blogspot anyway.
Exactly WHO [microsoft.com] is it that is most directly threatened by Google? I'm sure that had nothing to do with this, as we all know that they are pure as the driven snow [ncbi.nlm.nih.gov].
Exactly WHO is it that is most directly threatened by Google? I'm sure that had nothing to do with this, as we all know that they are pure as the driven snow."
Yeah, consider the source of the freakin' "report"
the report clearly states its from
Yi-Min Wang
Microsoft Research
and
Ming Ma Yuan Niu, Hao Chen
University of California, Davis
That would be a bit spooky if the three principle researchers were from the three principle syndicators who make a profit from the spam.
It's as if they would be saying to the major media outlets..."here's our research on how we make money from spam"
At issue is really the methodology. Can the results be replicated? If so, the original source of the research is not a scientifically interesting question.
The syndicators buy traffic from a small
number of aggregators (Layer #3), who in turn buy traffic from
web spammers to insulate syndicators and advertisers from spam
pages.
The above is from the report. Not that I'm trying to imply anything(or maybe I am)but this looks similar to the structure of organized crime groups. Insulate the people at the top from the "criminals" that do the dirty work. That's why crime bosses rarely go to prison and it's why those who fund spam are rarely held responsible.
</dan>
The trouble is, there's no algorithm that can automatically factor in the price of a service. It's free to set up a blog on Blogger, so it can be abused more easily. If these spammers actually had to pay for a new domain name every time they set up a splog, they wouldn't bother.
Definitely.
Most of the blog problem on blogger is really tied to adsense. If google monitored their program participants or simply removed the ability of blogger blogs to carry adsense, a lot of splogs would just die off and fewer would be created.
Those in glass houses...
