Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages

Splogs suck.  We all know that.  And we all know where they are, and why they’re there.  And we know Google has been slow to do anything about the problem, since Adwords are a gravy train for them.  Recently, Microsoft researchers have gotten to the bottom of the scum, and may have a way to filter splogs from legit blogs:



The researchers’ specific findings included evidence that some blog-hosting services have permitted an explosion of phony doorway pages. For example, the researchers noted that such pages were far more prevalent in Google’s blogspot.com service than in other hosting domains. The Microsoft Research team has worked extensively with the managers of Microsoft’s Spaces blog-hosting service to detect and identify search-engine spam, Mr. Wang said. Google would not comment for the record on its own efforts to combat such practices.


Full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/technology/19spam.html?ex=1332043200&en=63a9e5286915f3bb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.


(Hat tip: Stephanie’s FlowerHaus)


Add to this the findings that blogger.com is riddled with malware, and it seems to be only a matter of time before corporate filters blog blogger.com (if they don’t already).