The Wall Street Journal reported how the rise of spam blogs called splogs are affecting the search results.
Technorati says that between 2% to 8% of the 70,000 blogs created daily are phony blogs. These splogs promote anything sites like online casinos and pornography and are filled with keywords that help them rank in blog search. They also place Google Adsense to monetize clicks from the traffic they receive.
A large part of the problem stems from the free service offered by Google, called Blogger. Users can create a free account easily and have their content hosted for free on BlogSpot. Google has been implementing measures such as the use of captcha images to deter spammers from signing up spam accounts but this is unlikely to be effective. Captcha decoders are readily available and can always be fine-tuned to break new ones.
Whether Google takes steps to clean up blog search remains to be seen. Aaron believes Google ultimately wants users to search using conventional means. This is a plausible argument for the case of profits. Nevertheless, it’s another challenge spammers have created for the search community to grapple with.