Originally published December 7 2005
Google's Blogspot assaulted by spammers
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Google's free BlogSpot service recently saw an explosion in spam, as spammers began taking advantage of the service's push-button publishing to send out a massive amount of ads.
Google Inc.'s free BlogSpot service has become a happy hunting ground for spammers cashing in on the easy integration of AdSense advertisements into the "push-button" publishing tool.
An automated spam blog (splog) attack over the weekend was first flagged by Lockergnome's Chris Pirillo, who accused Google of hosting a "crapfarm" of fake blogs.
Pirillo's public complaint, which included a screencast of his experience wading through spam blogs in his RSS reader, was echoed throughout the blogosphere.
Blog Search Engine Threatens Ban of Blogger Blogs.
"When I looked at my PubSub feed, there were 31 entries, 30 splog.
This particular surge is using blogspot as an attack vector," Bray said, noting that the software being used to generate the fake blogs is "pretty sophisticated."
Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder of PubSub Concepts Inc., said the situation has gotten progressively worse and has forced the company to consider filtering BlogSpot results from its search service.
He blamed the splog explosion on the API (application programming interface) that Google offers to let users create tools to automate the creation of blogs and text entries.
The spammers are using scripts to hijack text from legitimate blogs and creating "tens of thousands" of blogs with high-interest keywords.
Dave Sifry, chief executive of Technorati Inc., reckons that about 40,000 spam blogs have been created in past two weeks.
On its Blogger Buzz Web site, Google acknowledged the troubles but stopped short of offering a comprehensive solution.
"One group of folks who are particularly affected by blog spam are those who use blog search services and those who subscribe to feeds of results from those services.
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