I run backlink checks on the sites I watch over via Google Blog Search, you know, now the number one blog search or something like that. For the past two weeks, they’re getting clogged with the type of crap I’ll list below. There’s always been some of this, but it’s worse than normal.
Now really, I should file a Google spam report. Or, I should also go to each of these splogs (all hosted on Blogger’s BlogSpot), stop some of them from reloading junky content and then use the little “Flag Blog” link that shows on some off them (not all of them, by any means) to report the objectionable content. But screw that.
In the spirit of the squeaky wheel gets the grease, I’m skipping past all the usual methods and just outing them for being so f’ing annoying. Sorry, but three days off from work left me mellow, which in turn leaves me ranty and irritable about this crud when I get back to work.
Here’s one of the backlink checks I do; here’s another (yeah, I still watch Search Engine Watch in case someone links to something I’ve written in the past). I also run checks on Daggle and The Daily SearchCast. Take a look at these items that flooded my feedreader today:
- Free No Purchase Background Searches That I Can Do Myself
- Free Only People Search Uk
- People Search Engine
- Search For People To Talk To On Yahoo Messenger
- Yahoo People Search 20
- People Yahoo Search Uk
- Search People From Yahoo By Location
- Yahoo People Search Australia 20
- Search Engines List For People
- No Fee Based People Search Engines
- Fee People Search Engine
- Lost People Search Engine
- Yahoo People Search 20
- People By Address Free Search Engine
- Locating People Search Engines
- New People Search Engines
- People Search Via Address
- Msn People Search Find Email Address
- Tail Long Search Find Study Case Things Users People Show
- People Search Engine Background 20
- Most Powerful Search Engine For Locating People In
- Search Yahoo People Chat
- People Search Com Yahoo 20
- Village People Search Engine
- Engine Free Only People Search Uk Virgin
- Tail Long Search Find Study Case Things Users People Show
- Village People Search Engine
Most of these pages simply feature scraped Google search results. That’s the search engine food, of course. Then they fire you off to another site using this code to load a frame up:
<iframe frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” width=”1″ height=”1″ src=”http://bestpriceforall.com/detective/counter.php?tm=people_search” align=”left”></iframe>
Like I said, I could do the regular spam reporting route. But that means covering at least 10 different Blogger accounts. I don’t have time to do this. Who does? And isn’t the algorithm supposed to weed this garbage out? You know, algorithmically. Isn’t Blogger supposed to be halting sign-ups of accounts like this, you know, like they say:
Automated spam classifying algorithms keep spam blogs out of NextBlog and out of our “Recently Published” list on the dashboard.
Um hmm. Like how after I flagged one of this, then clicked Next Blog out of curiosity and ended up on a phentermine blog. Argh. Argh, argh, argh!
There’s one big caveat on this, of course. The relevancy of backlink lookups is much different than the relevancy if I was doing a keyword search. Pages that might otherwise get buried in a keyword search (and thus not be annoying) are more likely to show up in a backlink search. Then again, Robert Scoble wasn’t that impressed recently with the splogs on a keyword search for his name.
Anyway, I just want it to be magically fixed. While you’re at it, fix the Google News Search press release junk Greg’s complaining about. And ban the affiliate site(s) generating this. And their families. And burn their villages, salt their fields and yank the site paying the affiliates for a day or two.
