Blogspot is 75% spam: What's The Reality

Today I read a post titled "Blogspot is 75% spam" written by Steve Rubel on his blog. He references a research study conducted by Microsoft in order to analyze how advertisers connect with web spammers.

The report shows that Google's Blogspot.com is being heavily used as "Doorway Domain" for redirection spamming. The redirection spamming is the process through which ads are routed through various syndicators, aggregators and redirection domains and finally posted on spam doorway pages such as a blog hosted on blogspot.com address. The click-through traffice is sent to the advertisers by passing through all the channels in the reverse order. The same is depicted in the image below.


Following is the excerpt from the report "For Layer #1 – doorway domains, we showed that the free blog-hosting site blogspot.com had an-order-of-magnitude higher spam appearances in top search results than other hosting domains in both benchmarks, and was responsible for about one in every four spam appearances (22% and 29% in the two benchmarks respectively, to be exact). In addition, at least three in every four unique blogspot URLs that appeared in top-50 results for commercial queries were spam (77% and 75%)."

Although I do not disagree with the fact that Blogger as a service is being used for spamming which is very normal keeping in mind the publicity of the service and that it is free, I certainly have some concerns with the research methodology and the way it has been reported at various blogs including Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion

1. Since the entire study was built around spam, the numbers reported are the contribution of blogspot.com domain to the spam URLs. This does not takes into account the entire universe of blogs hosted at blogspot.com. Thus it is wrong to say that Blogspot.com is 75% Spam.

2. The report says that the study began with the Live search result for keywords "cheap ticket" which resulted in three spam URLs in the Top 1o results and two of the three were blogspot.com URLs. These URLs, however, do not show up in Google and Yahoo. This certainly raises a question mark on Live Search indexing and filtering methodology.

3. Even Netscape.com has 74% Spam URLs then why only Blogspot.com has been targeted in the report. Is it the effect of the competition!

It is a fact that Blogger is being used for activities like Phishing and Spamming. Apart from commercial spamming, the free service is used by some of the bloggers to raise their Technorati rankings and Search Engine Rankings. However, attaching a certain figure like 75% of it is spam does not hold any truth.

You can download the entire report by clicking here.