Splogs Reach Critical Mass?

With the exception of Mark Cuban and maybe Doc Searls, just about every high profile bloggers have been largely ignoring splog problem or at least haven't commented about the problem. Today is first day when many of them spoke out against it and urged Google to do something about it. IceRocket has even stopped indexing blogspot blogs for time being. Why did it seem like everyone took notice of splog problem all at once? It was because of one spammer. It appears this one blog spammer went bit overboard on Sunday and created tens of thousands of splogs all by himself. There was a definite spike in number of splogs on Sunday since early morning. He created splogs that were equivalent to about three times the daily average of all splogs being created per day. He essentially buried all all blogs and all other splogs with his massive number of splog. Also his splogs were designed to avoid Next Blog button ring filter so about half the day his splogs were only thing showing up on Next Blog button.

I wonder if Google will finally do something about splog problem now. Honestly I really doubt it and here is the reason why. Currently Google makes money whenever spammers makes money. They get a cut of the money whenever money flows from advertisers to publishers. No splogs, no money. It's that simple. Also having all these splogs clogging up blogspot and more importantly search engines actually help Google. For small search engines like IceRocket or Technorati, splogs are big problem since it will take up alot of resource to filter them out. For Google they have the money and the resource so it's not such a big deal. Having these splogs hurts the little search engines lot more than Google.

I've had these very cynical view of Google with regards to splogs for some time now but I gave them the benefit of the doubt so far. But when Google created Blog Search it started to make sense. I do believe that this splog problem will grow to the point where even Google has no choice but to simply remove blogspot and perhaps other blogs from the main Google search index. I see Google's Blog Search as a eventual dumping ground of all blogs which is essentially ghettofying the blogosphere. I sure hope it doesn't come to that but when my report of over 5000 splogs are simply being ignored by Blogger support, I can't help but to think this is inevitable. It's only matter of time.

If anyone wants the list of splogs created yesterday by that one spammer please feel to email me at fightsplog@gmail.com.