Chris Pirillo heeft tien suggesties aan Google gedaan om de enorme toename in spam-blogs (splogs) tegen te gaan. De suggesties zijn gericht aan Google, eigenaar van de gratis weblogservice Blogger, omdat er vooral op het .blogspot-domein gigantische hoeveelheden splogs staan en worden aangemaakt. Eind augustus bleek uit een test dat op het blogspot-domein 42% van de weblogs een splog is.

01. Employ a blog spammer. Beat them shitless once they've been hired (hazing spammers isn't illegal), but then employ them to help you figure out what all those asshats are doing. After they've told you the secrets, beat them shitless again.

02. Probationary Period. Only allow new users to create a limited amount of blogs. Say, only one for the first three months. Then, if that goes well, let 'em create six. Then, if THAT goes well, let 'em create six more. Offer carrots. "You've had your blog for a year. Happy birthday! You now have XYZ access!" Oh, isn't that nice. Slap rel="nofollow" on all outbound links for the first X months. I realize rel="nofollow" isn't perfect, and it's not going to stop people from doing what they're likely to do anyway. However, give spammers one less reason to come to you to do their dirty deeds.

03. Sponsor a Blogger. The "new" way to get a Blogger account is to be referred by someone else. Then, if the invited one screws up and starts spamming the blogosphere with bunk or copied content, revoke both accounts - the inviter and the invitee.

04. New banner button. You're showing me ways to get my own blog at the top of every single Blogspot page. However, since I don't have the Google toolbar installed *GASP* - I can't report spammers! What's stopping you from putting a "Flag" button in the banner, too? Let anybody report the problem, easily and quickly. NEVERMIND, I just saw it appear in the toolbar - and may have missed it before! Just flagged 10 out of 20 I visited... blatant problem children. Consider this point a note to all you do-gooders.

05. Take every experience seriously. Yesterday was not the first time anybody reported on the Blogspot honeypot problem. Even with Dave Sifry reporting that only a small portion of today's blog are splogs, how will the ratio sit in a few months? I can tell you, I get far more email spam than I do legit emails these days - and I get a lot of emails every day.

06. Cross reference your databases. I know you're tracking this stuff effectively in Google. You probably know which URLs are spam and which aren't. You likely know which ones are link farms with self referential links and which aren't. When a new Blogspot blog points to something that Google already knows is a "bad seed," automatically suspend that Blogspot account. You're Google, man...

07. Reward flaggers. Send 'em a t-shirt for every X thousand VALID splogs they flag. Give folks an incentive, and... it seems that everybody goes ga-ga for a t-shirt. Seriously. Even let 'em parade their VALID numbers somewhere on their blog. "I've killed X thousand splogs to date... and all I got was this lousy t-shirt." But it's NOT lousy - it's a good idea.

08. Audit randomly. Say, a few times a year, you do some kind of "Hey, we just wanted to make sure you're enjoying our service" message interruption when someone tries to access their account. It's a random hoop to jump through, and if you do it right, the true users won't mind a bit. Flag the account so that they have to answer a question to regain access to their account, via the Web or otherwise. XML-RPC folks will be forced to log in and answer a random (non-invasive) query.

09. Flag "hot" keywords. If you don't know what those might be, talk to your buddies over in the AdWords department. Any kind of pr0n subdomain references should be instantly earmarked for review as well.

10. No more dashes. Seems a good chunk of splogs have dashes in the subdomain. Eliminate that as a possibility. Seems that most "real" users don't care about using dashes.

» Ten Suggestions for Google's Blogspot

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