JG etc.

Randy Charles Morin has written a post entitled, “State of the Splogosphere, Part III” on his RSS Blog. It is a good piece with a great conclusion, but I do have one issue with the softball thrown at Google.

One things that has changed is the preferred splogging framework. Six months ago, almost every splog was found on Blogspot, but thanks to a lot of effort on Google’s part, this is no longer true. Sploggers prefer the self hosted Wordpress platform. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still lots of splogs on Blogspot, but the search engines and Google have teamed to reduce the number of those splogs that are appearing in the blog search result pages.

Any hard numbers to show that Google is cleaning up it’s act or is Google just doing a better job masking the real issue?(”search engines and Google have teamed to reduce the number of those splogs that are appearing“) A simple search on: mortgage blogspot.com in most search engines will bring back plenty of unfortunate/unintended consequences.(Google BlogSearch appearing to provide superior search results because they can better filter their own spam is not a competitive advantage, it is competitive bulls**t.) And while there may be a much smaller issue with the hosted solution of WordPress(one that would be forseeable considering it is a new, rapidly growing hosted BSP), I don’t see the WordPress team promoting; “Quick Cash: With our new AdSense tool, it’s now easier than ever to make money by blogging.” Or the shameless plugging of AdSense for parked domains.

When it comes to comment spam, why is WordPress leading the way in providing tools like Akismet to conquer spam? Where is Google here? Surely they have a few more engineers and resources. Are we suppose to applaud the rel=”nofollow” attribute and captia on Blogger as Google really fighting comment spam?

Kill the incentive, kill spam. Clean up the business of AdSense and SEO and you will eliminate a good portion of the problem. I’m just not sure that Google or it’s shareholders are into that plan.