Google’s Blogger hosting tons of spam blogs?

According to a study from WebmasterWorld 77% of the blogs hosted on Google’s Blogger service are spam blogs. The research was conducted by analyzing the 1000 most popular search queries and checking whether the resulting blogs were spam or legit ones.

There are several other “doorway domains” involved in the research, below you will find some of them and the respective percentage of spam blogs hosted:

  • blogspot.com 77%
  • netscape.com 74%
  • hometown.aol.com 84%
  • home.aol.com 95%
  • blogstudio.com 99%

Another interesting fact is the percentage of spam blogs on top level domains:

  • .info 68%
  • .biz 53%
  • .net 12%
  • .org 11%
  • .com 4,1%

I guess it just confirms the idea that you should always pick a .com domain if you serious about your website or blog.

Via: Search Engine Roundtable

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19 Responses to “Google’s Blogger hosting tons of spam blogs?”

  1. engtech on March 23rd, 2007 10:18 am

    I outright ban .info and .biz from comments and trackbacks because it avoids so much spam.

  2. Mike Panic on March 23rd, 2007 10:44 am

    The sad thing is I don’t think Google cares about all the splogs. If you are bored, find a blogspot blog running the Blogger toolbar at the very top and hit the Next button and go through a few of the blogs, there is nothing of any sort of quality on them ever!

    I know of only a few blogs that are still on blogspot worth reading, http://www.strobist.blogspot.com/ is one if you are a photographer, but at least he bought the strobist.com domain name too.

  3. Daniel on March 23rd, 2007 2:17 pm

    engtech, I tend to follow a similar approach, not necessarity to comments but definitely for trackbacks.

  4. Ron on March 23rd, 2007 3:33 pm

    Hi,

    I’ve been running my 1st blog for almost a month now. It is depressing how many damn blogs are just spam sites. I’m happy to go other persons’ blogs and comment on them with the hope they will do the same. The spam blogs can all die in a fire AFAIC.

    –Ron

  5. Eli on March 23rd, 2007 5:42 pm

    Well, Blogger is a very quick and easy way to start a free blog, why wouldn’t people use it for serious spam? :)

    I tried Blogger a while ago, it’s really quick to start a blog with it, and it’s quite nice too. But I’m sticking with WordPress.

    Anyway, that’s a pretty large percentage of spam blogs..

  6. Broc on March 23rd, 2007 8:07 pm

    i wonder how this study defines a “spam site”

  7. Daniel on March 24th, 2007 1:45 am

    Eli, that is right, if I am not wrong there even exist automated tools that create hundreads of blogs on Blogger in a matter of seconds hehe.

  8. Ashish Mohta on March 24th, 2007 2:02 am

    I dont think you will pushed aside if you dont have a .com site.

    We see less spam on .com site because this domain was only available initially.When web started building ,all were like Good site not spammers.Now today we are running out of names on .com domain so people tend to wards .net or .info and others.

    Now the real part, Spamming concept grew up lately like may be 5 yrs.By the time they started growing stronger .com domain names were out of stock and became costly.So what they did was started buying other domains.Thats the reason you see the percentage high there.Its a matter of time.

  9. Daniel on March 24th, 2007 2:32 am

    Ashish, I agree with that other domains apart from .com can succeed, but they have a harder time in doing so (for instance if you have a .net domain a lot of your first time readers might try to visit the site again by typing the name of your blog plus a .com, and they will end up on the wrong place). Problogger.com had an alexa rank of 150,000 without even having a site :)

    Secondly, regarding the percentage of spam domains, yeah the reason you mentioned seems plausible, but it has nothing to do with the result. It is like cause and effect. You mentioned the cause, the effect is that people tend to give less credibility to domains that are not a .com.

  10. Leonardo on March 24th, 2007 5:04 am

    “The research was conducted by analyzing the 1000 most popular search queries”

    By using the “most popular search queries” it is very likely to find all the spammers, since spammers intentionally make their sites to match such queries. I have a Blogger blog and I am happy with their service. And I think they are trying to fight spam as much as possible. I got my blog blocked once under suspicion os spam just because I had inserted many links to videos of my favorite tv show in one single post.

  11. Syaf The Geek on March 24th, 2007 5:49 am

    I have a blogspot account 2 years ago but all that I’ve got is tons of spam in my comments. That really piss me off. I’ve quit blogspot and now when I’m using Wordpress it is not to say safe but if I use akismet plugin. Makes my life so easy.

  12. Sean on March 24th, 2007 7:58 pm

    That doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s free so of course spammers are going to use it and get money from it.

  13. Rishi on March 25th, 2007 7:20 am

    Hey Daniel,

    I run my blog on a .INFO domain, is it bad for the health of my blog?

    I bought it because I don’t have much funding and the hard $5 I got on winning a contest on Kauntest in my Paypal and utilized it to buy a domain.

  14. Daniel on March 25th, 2007 10:23 am

    Rishi,

    Honestly if I were you I would save some money and buy a .com domain. You can certainly grow a blog on a .info domain, but I think it will pose some uncessesary obstacles on your way. You may also want to pick a name that has some keywords instead of your personal name.

    Your blog already has a PR4, it should not be difficult to raise some money from it either selling text links or putting some advertising there.

  15. Barry Schwartz on March 27th, 2007 3:25 am

    FYI, that story was basically stolen without source from my blog at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/012778.html

  16. Daniel on March 27th, 2007 4:46 am

    Thanks for pointing it out Barry, I will correct my reference to your blog now. Around the blogosphere it looked like Infoniac broke the story, sorry to hear they “forgot” to mention you as the reference.

  17. Barry Schwartz on March 27th, 2007 4:50 am

    It was because they were on the front page of Digg. Happens way too often.

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