Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer isn’t the only executive Google has moved to cursing. IceRocket’s Mark Cuban has joined the chorus after his search engine results were clogged with spam blog (splog) returns, most of which bore the blogspot.com URL. Cuban says its time for Google to get its [expletive deleted] together, and until that time has blocked blogspot.com from his IceRocket index.
It wasn’t long ago that we found out that more than half of all weblogs were spam blogs (splogs), and Google’s Blogger.com was the chief target of spam marketers. Though Google was proactive in its attempts to combat the problem, enacting the “Flag As Objectionable” feature, the number of splogs has continued to rise.
At Blog Maverick, the Dallas Mavericks owner and IceRocket founder Mark Cuban not only rails on Google’s ineffectiveness at controlling the number of splogs being created through Blogger.com, but also claims a “splogbomb” has been created to further exploit Blogger’s vulnerabilities.
“The blogosphere was hit by a blogspot.com splogbomb [Oct. 16]. Someone did the inevitable and wrote a script that created blog after blog and post after post,” writes Cuban. “I’m not talking 100 blogs with a 100 posts each. Im talking what could easily turn into 10s of THOUSANDS of blogs pinging out millions of posts!”
Cuban goes on to complain that IceRocket.com is so clogged up with splogs that blogspot.com URL’s will not be indexed until Google fixes the problem.
An anti-splog weblog has even been created for the sole purpose of updating readers on the author’s battle against splog. Aptly titled, “Fighting Splog,” the author’s most recent entry involves the deletion of over 2,500 (presumably) Blogger splogs.
The author predicts he/she can continue at a rate of 2000 splogs a day for the next two weeks. And that may only be a dent in the splog-armor, as this same author reports finding 18,000 gambling related splogs alone.
This same author reports that Google AdWords is producing sponsored links for spammy content generators designed purely to game the system. “ArticleBurner” draws the ire of this blogger, a sister product of “BlogBurner,” the sponsored links for which have been removed from Google’s SERPs.
“Apparently googling blogburner’ no longer shows Rick Butts’ spamming software in blue sponsored links on top of search result. I started to wonder if Google actually stopped doing business with this spammer but after some digging it turns out that was not the case. Googling for articleburner’ will reveal his other spamming tool still being advertised,” reads the blog.
Some of Blogger.com’s toughest critics are calling for action, asking for a more effective way of filtering out spammer intrusions into the blogosphere.
