A pair of Microsoft researchers claim to have discovered how to combat spam blogs, or splogs, and say that Google’s Blogger hosting service is to blame for permitting such phony doorway pages to grow like kudzu.
According to The New York Times, a technical paper published by the researchers says the links promoting such pages are generated by a small group of shadowy operators apparently with the acquiescence of some major advertisers, Web page hosts and advertising syndicators.
Blogger, which Google acquired in 2003, only recently left its beta phase. The service is popular, but has suffered from outages and relatively small feature sets compared to independent blog services.
However, I’m of the belief that Google’s purchase of Blogger is one of the main reasons for Google’s popularity with bloggers in general. As any blogger who follows his traffic stats know, Google is the primary traffic driver to blogs, far outpacing Yahoo, MSN and AOL search. No doubt Google’s in-house study of blog networks facilitated its incorporation of blogs into its SERPs.