Spam blogs (Splots) are blogs mostly hosted on Googles popular platform Blogspot that exist to generate links and promote a product.

This post took a look at 50 blogs and found 30 were spam blogs.
That’s 60%. Redoing the test with 150 blogs,there were 63 generating and spewing pure spam.

Even though I expected some amount of spam, I was surprised just how much it is. From the small sample I took it looks like on average, a site hosted at Google’s Blogspot is more likely to contain spam than anything else. If you’d consider Blogspot a community, it would be a very unhealthy one. If you consider it just another free web hosting service, than the amount of spam still reflects badly on Google. As for those spam blogs which try to boost their Google rankings, it’s ironic that this is done on Google’s own servers. That’s as ridiculous as a cleaning lady with very dirty shoes.

Google reacted in partly by introducing Captchas for signing up, and by allowing users to flag content they find questionable. Could this be too little too late? And do they really expect users to flag thousands of spam pages – or do they want to get an idea of general patters that make up this spam, in order to automatically remove large portions of it?