Apparently googling "blogburner" no longer shows Rick Butts' spamming software in blue sponsored links on top of search result. I started to wonder if Google actually stopped doing business with this spammer but after some digging it turns out that was not the case. Googling for "articleburner" will reveal his other spamming tool still being advertised. Perhaps Rick Butts has voluntarily pulled his advertisement off of Google. Then again maybe Google is one who removed the sponsored link but then how come they left his other spam tools? Did Rick Butts have multiple AdWords accounts and Google just happen to miss it? Perhaps Google has a problem with blogburner but not articleburner and therefore decided to keep Rick Butts as a advertiser despite the fact that he is still a spammer? I don't think I'll ever know for sure what happened. I have yet to get a clear indication as to where Google currently stands with regards to spammers on Blogspot, AdWords, and AdSense.
Speaking of Google doing business with spammers, if you google for "rss2blog", you'll see more advertisements of spamming softwares. rss2blog is a software that allows anyone to just dump rss feeds into blogspot blog in masses. This software tends to create splogs which has a predictable pattern of a link and a block of text below and this tends to bypass the recently implemented splog filter from Next Blog button ring.
Google was very quick to remove all 2763 porn related splogs I've sumbitted days earlier. Having said that I'm not entirely certain if I had anything to do with it. I never received the semi human/machine generated email telling me that they've received my email. That confirmation email tends to somewhat funny as well as bit annoying since it recommends that I use "Flagging as Objectionable" feature. I can't imagine me or anyone visiting thousands of splogs and clicking on flag button.
Update: I did eventually get a confirmation email from Blogger support.
SPLOG = SPAM + BLOG
Friday, October 07, 2005
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3 comments:
Do you get that reply from Google only when you email them lists of porn splogs? Or is it any list of splogs? Their suggestion to use the Flag feature for spam pretty much blows that censorship guy's theory that it is "not primarily about spam."
I finally got a boilerplate email response from them. The response email is identical in everyway with all the other response I got from them except this one took three days instead of the usual one day.
Most of the 2085 splogs I reported back then were not deleted even now but this batch of 2763 porn related splogs were deleted almost immediately. I'm guessing the word porn had something to do with their immediate action. I'm currently putting together a batch of gambling related splogs. We'll see how Blogger likes those.
I used to be the author of a fairly popular academic blog at http://flashtopian.blogspot.com, which has recently been taken over by a splogger who has inserted links to porn sites inside a faux-academic post. It's extremely disturbing that people who used to link to me are now linking to this jerk. It's like he's stolen my identity, and replaced it with "Vagina Fisting Lessons."
Thanks for bringing people's attention to this problem.
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