Blog search engines try to block fakes

Fake blogs created for advertising purposes are causing headaches for search engines, with Google's Blogger accused of being the most common source of splogs

Blog search engines are struggling to block the increasing number of blogs that contain spam, commonly known as splogs.



Mark Cuban, the owner of a blog search engine IceRocket, said on Monday that spam occurs in "monstrous proportions" in blogs. Google's free Blogger service is a common source of splogs and spammers are automating the creation of blogs using this service, said Cuban in a blog posting.



"Blogger is by far the worst offender," he said. "It's fast, it's easy, it's free and it can be automated. So blogs are coming at us left and right. We are killing off thousands a day, but they keep on coming."



Cuban warned that splog detection algorithms are not perfect, so innocent bloggers are increasingly likely to find their sites blocked, particularly if they use the Blogger service.



"If you are an individual blogger whose blog is hosted on blogspot.com, every day the chances of you being excluded from icerocket.com's, and other search engines' indexes increases. It's not just blogspot.com, pretty much 90-plus percent of blogs hosted on .info sites are splogs as well," Cuban claimed.


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