Blogger unveils features that might slow blog spam

I recently posted about the rising number of splogs – spam blogs – that just post gibberish content with links to other sites in hope to improve the search rankings of the sites linked to. Blogger blogs, including many lawyer backed, are the biggest culprits primarily because they are free to produce.

SearchEngineWatch reports “Google’s Blogger team has unveiled two new features that could pontentially help slow the amount of spam coming from Blogger/Blogspot hosted blogs.” For those unaware, Google owns Blogger.

First is a ‘flag’ feature that allows the Blogger community to identify potentially ‘objectionable’ blogs. In the cases where objectionable content has been identified, the most common action is for the support team to ‘delist’ the blog. However SearchEngineWatch notes this simply means that the blog is not promoted in areas of blogger.com like Recently Updated – but it’s still viewable on the web. The content is not blocked or removed in anyway when the blog is delisted.

This will not do a lot to eliminate splogs. One, the blogs with links remain to help spike search results. Second, these blogs are often not found in searches so there is not going to be a lot of black flagging.

The second new feature hopes to reduce blog comment spam. There will be an option for a Blogger user to require a person who leaves a comment to enter a word or letters into a box to get the comments to post.

I am not optimistic Google is going to do much to rectify splog problems. Google has owned Blogger for over two years and has done virtually nothing to improve the service.

As noted by SearchEnigineWatch Blogger doesn’t even mention these new services on the Blogger home page or login page.