I have heard of trackback spam. Heck, I have even had to remove my fair share of it! But for someone to create a Blogspot blog just to create posting spam…that is simply sad.

I’ve been cruising the Blogspot world lately looking for cool stuff that the bigger geeklogs might have missed (and I found some cool knitting sites [1, 2] as a result last time I did this). What I’ve found, though, is that a large percentage (maybe up to a third) of all Blogspot blogs are spam-logs - sites created to increase the Google ranking of some other site (which is itself usually a Google-spamming site). The ultimate purpose of these spamlogs is usually to drive traffic to a commission-paying pharmacy, pr0n, or casino site.

Some of the spamlogs hosted at Blogspot, which apparently does not have a policy against them, are obvious in their intent (for example). It requires a human to start a new Blogspot-hosted site, but after the initial setup (which can be partially aided by scripts, I’m sure), bots can post like crazy. Usually the posts are strings of highly searched terms (like the names of celebrities, TV shows, or something Google Adsense pays a lot for, like asbestos litigation), with a link to the external site that the spammer is trying to bump up in the Google rankings. [Read the rest]