IceRocket owner Mark Cuban has warned Blogspot bloggers that their blogs may soon be excluded from IceRocket and other search engines due to their domain being overwhelmed by spam blogs. (via the Search Engine Journal and the Blog Herald)
He says: “Blogger is by far the worst offender. Google seems to be working hard to adjust their relevancy indexes to exclude splog from having influence on search rankings, but they don’t seem to be doing anything more than removing reported splogs (spam blogs). Kind of like going after the zombies one at a time with a shovel.”
I doubt exclusion of a major service is the right way to fight spam. In fact if this becomes a trend, i.e. IceRocket, Technorati, Bloglines, BlogPulse … etc. will boycott the Blogspot domain, wouldn’t that force Google to accelerate either by development or acquisition it’s plans to “own” the blog search space rather than see it’s bloggers flock away?
On the other hand, how important is it for Google to maintain Blogger as a free service? Any individual blogger can afford a symbolic price, say $3 /month which would still add up to significant cost to spammers who create blogs by the thousands automatically. An even better option may be to slap them with a one-time blog creation fee.
It may be less elegant .. geeky … whatever.. .but when technology fails, why not use economic means to fight spam?
Update (8/17): Frank has created a site called Splog Reporter where anyone can flag Splog/Clog. Frank, will Rel 2.0 be a bookmarklet (“this is splog”) that pre-populates the fields? 
Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Blog Spam, Spam, Technorati, IceRocket, BlogSpot, Google
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