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Blogs Make it to the Spam League

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Your Inbox clogger-spam-has reinvented itself for the world of blogs, in

a phenomenon experts have dubbed 'splog'. Google for now is feeling the

heat. In October, the search giant's Blogger blog-creation tool and BlogSpot

hosting service fell victim to the biggest splog attack yet-an assault that

led to clogged RSS (really simple syndication) readers and overflowing inboxes.

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The attacker, or splogger, used automated tools to manipulate the

Blogger-BlogSpot service and create thousands of fake blogs loaded with links to

specific web sites (home mortgage, poker, and tobacco sites among them). The

move was designed to doctor search results and boost traffic to those sites by

fooling the search-engine spiders that crawl the Web looking for commonly

linked-to destinations. Unlike e-mail programs, blogging services don't have the

capability to easily detect and filter out spam, said Bob Wyman, Chief

Technology Officer at blog search and tracking service PubSub.

Google's Jason Goldman, product manager for Blogger, said Google has been

working to address the splog problem for a while, instituting precautions such

as allowing users to flag suspicious blogs as potential fakes and prompting blog

creators to manually transcribe distorted words to verify that the blog was

created by a human and not a machine.

And, he said, Google is not alone in being attacked. "Weblogs in general

are having a problem with spam right now, not just Blogger," he said.

"While it is a problem, it is certainly not the majority case on BlogSpot,

at all."

Source: www.news.com

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