It was exactly two months ago I wrote about problems that Icerocket.com and really, the entire blogosphere was having with Splogs created and maintained on Blogger.com, with a blogspot.com URL.
Well the Shit hit the fan today.
The blogosphere was hit by a blogspot.com splogbomb. Someone did the inevitable and wrote a script that created blog after blog and post after post.
Im 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 !
Do a search for HDNet on Icerocket.com or any of the other engines and look at all the Splogs there are. And they have URLs like this So google, at least for the time being, we shut out adding new blogspot posts to our index until we clean all the bullshit you dumped on us out of our indexes. We will turn them on once our filters are in place, which hopefully will be tomorrowSo google, at least for the time being, we shut out adding new blogspot posts to our index until we clean all the bullshit you dumped on us out of our indexes. We will turn them on once we update our filters to resolve this fine mess you got us into, which hopefully will be tomorrow
I apologize in advance to real bloggers whose post might not make it in as quickly as before. We wont lose your posts. They are just going to be delayed.
I also apologize in advance if someones blog or posts got filtered out in our effort to deal with Splogs.
So please Google. Add a challenge system. Dump the flag you tried. It was a nice try, but doesnt get the job done. Its not an imposition to ask a blog poster to confirm their post with a link inside an email, or a word confirmation. It may not eradicate the problem, but it will improve the quality of information available in the blogosphere considerably.
Is that too much to ask ?
And one more point about splogs and the blogs. There is a reason why you dont see Icerocket.com list the number of blogs and posts on our site Because no splog filter is perfect, which makes the number pretty bogus.
The same applies to people who evaluate the quality of a blog search engine by the number of posts returned. In actuality, a higher number probably means poor splog filtering, not better indexing.