As many of my readers probably know (and probably agree with), I’m not a fan of free blogging services. Why? Let’s face it, human nature tells us that giving away free stuff brings out the worst in people. However, the sheer amounts of spam, scam and junk blogs hosted by Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services is seriously polluting the internet with downright trash. If one of us webmasters or bloggers were to host such a site that contains so much duplicate content, copyrighted materials and just plain garbage, Google would surely penalize our sites, regardless if there were any useful content presented in between the junk. Is this yet one more clear cut sign that Google, the “Do no Evil” company has painfully mutated into a “double standards” company? Heaven knows they have the resources to clean up their act.
Does Google really care? Hell no. Why do I care? As a webmaster who owns several blogs, several forums and a human edited blog directory, I have been spending hours per day removing spammer links from my sites that point back at these abominable free blogging services. Does that mean I think all free blog services are tools for spammers? No it doesn’t. I have never had a single problem with spammers dropping links to Wordpress free hosted blogs. Why? Because Wordpress heavily moderates their free blogs and they remove blogs that don’t meet their quality criteria. Not to mention, Wordpress doesn’t allow Adsense (or any other form of monetization) on their free blogs which makes them useless to spammers.
You might be thinking to yourself, “Google allows you to flag a spammy blog”, well, maybe they do have a flag button at the top of every free hosted blog, but I’m certain that button doesn’t work because I’ve used it numerous times to no effect.
I’ve already gotten into the habit with every new blog I bring up for my network or for a client, that the first thing I do is add “blogger.com” and “blogspot.com” to the comment blacklist. I do the same thing for every forum I install. The first thing is to add those two domains to the list of censored words on the forum.
As for my blog directory, I just had some joker submit 700+ spam blogs hosted on blogger.com and he did them all by hand because the submit form for my directory is nearly impossible to automate (unless you’re a libcurl genius and can crack captchas). This person even email confirmed each individual entry. I kid you not, 700+ blogs he bothered to create on blogger.com and then starts submitting them to my directory !!! I have to give the guy some credit because it must have taken him several hours unless he had a boiler room full of Nigerian 419 spammers working for him when they were on a break from creating phishing schemes. All his work was removed from my directory with one SQL statement that took me all of 30 seconds to write and execute. Zap, bye bye…
The point I’m trying to make is that Google is so anal retentive about every other webmasters’ content (especially ones not paying for Adwords) and they continually regurgitate their quality guidelines through their sock puppet Matt Cutts. Not to mention, Google wants to tell us how to create our sites, how to link to and from our sites and basicly when we should take a dump, but in the meantime, besides their shady Adsense for Domains and Adsense for error pages, Google has created the most massive FFA, link farm, spam farm ever witnessed on the internet. Not even Angelfire, Tripod and other free website junkyards could ever hold a candle to the massive abomination that Blogger and Blogspot have become.
It’s worthy to note Google doesn’t offer a contact for support on these services but they do have a notorious spam bot that has been locking legitimate bloggers out of their accounts. Way to go !!
What do you think? Is Google allowing the creation of spam farms on Blogger and Blogspot? Do they have a double standard for content on their network versus other networks ?
Off rant…
My blog got picked up as a spam blog by Blogger by mistake so I shifted over to a self hosted Wordpress at Hostgator because the free Wordpress blogs don’t allow ads on them.
So true this free blogs by the big G! are full of the spam and trash. They spam my blog every day on the hundreds of messages for naught.
Why does not the brains at G! fix this problema?
I agree with you. There are some truly awful blogger blogs out there that are either direct cut and paste jobs or just a collection of articles picked up from one of the free article sites. I’ve flagged a couple of blogs that directly cut and pasted my stuff and that were doing some hotlinking and nothing happened.
i don’t think google is allowing the creation of spam farms on Blogger and Blogspot. Google always go for quality work.
Jimmy, I have to disagree. When Google allows somebody to create 700+ blogs there’s something wrong. I have seen people on certain blackhat forums claiming they’ve created 50-60 blogs on Blogger with no problem.
It just strikes me as odd that Google hasn’t mastered a simple thing 99% of forum owners have and that’s weeding out duplicate IP’s or proxy users.
Also, there’s really no excuse for all the pharamceutical blogs with names like
buy-oxycodone-pills.blogspot.com
Come on.
It has since been implemented in most other browsers but IE8 looks strong
I think i have seen more spam blogs other than on bloggers or blogspot. People are using spam blogs as short cut money making route.
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I hope google understand about this