Google Can't Figure Out That Its Own Blog Isn't Spam

from the whoops dept

Splogs have been a problem for a while now. Spammers set up sites full of content -- generally stolen from legitimate sites -- in order to grab search traffic and make money from ads or through other means. Blog platform providers don't want to waste resources supporting these sites, so many of them have some form of anti-splog system, including Google's Blogspot platform. But clearly they need more work, since Blogspot's marked an official Google blog as spam (via Infoworld), leading to its disappearance and the takeover of its URL by another blogger. Apparently the system's warning emails to the Google bloggers went unheeded, so after a period of time, the site was automatically taken down, and another blogger swooped in and grabbed the URL. The company realized what happened, and restored the site, but the episode highlights just how poorly anti-spam blog systems tend to work.

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