I’ve just been reading The Wall Street Journals article on spamblogs and it had some fairly interesting statistics included in it:

About 70000 new blogs are created daily

2 - 8% of blogs are fake

700000 to 1.3 million blog entries are posted daily

about 50000 are posts made to fake or spam blogs

Its faily staggering numbers to be sure and for those, myself included, that have had to go through and clear out spam comment after spam comment its no suprise and is why I now use Wordpress with tough antispam scripts running behind the scenes. I was visiting a Blogspot blog today where i went to comment on a couple of the psots and there was comment after comment that had been deleted because it was comment spam promoting what ever thing was the spam flavour of the moment.

Believe it or not the article as well as many angry posts around the blogsphere such as on Blog Maverick lay the blame fair and square at the feet of Google and their page rank system as the page rank works in simple terms on the number of links google finds linking to a site and assigns the rank according. Higher the rank means the higher the place in search results that particular site appears. There is an excellent post on Problogger that explains page rank much better than i am able.

So with many big name bloggers coming out against google whats the company whose motto is “Do no evil” doing about the problem? Until i started looking into spam blogs i wasn’t even aware that there was an an offical blogger blog called Blogger Buzz and it was with much suprise that I followed a link to the blog. So far other than captchas (those funny little pictures that you have to enter the word into the form for it to successfully post) it appears the answer is to a certain extent (at least in my opinion) not a real lot. This Blogger Buzz post details the fact that they deleted the blogs, have flag as objectionable and have captchas but if i was faced with the problem then it wouldn’t fill me with any confidence that they have any real strategy to combat the problem. Reading other posts like on Blog Maverick the blogging world thinks it isn’t enough and i tend to agree one hundred percent with them.

So next time you find you have to delete 5 or 10 blog spam comments, thank Google for it. I know i do.