New horizons in spamming aka SpamBlog ( Rick H needs to be cloned? )
February 12th, 2005 by Angsuman ChakrabortyI accidentally stumbled upon a site ( spam-guard[dot]blogspot[dot]com ) which exists for the sole purpose of spamming. It is a spam blog or splog!
For sometime spammers have targeted blogs, first through comment spam and now increasingly through trackback spam. While bloggers are adopting measures like captcha and spam karma to thwart them they have turned to another direction.
Why spam others when you can create a spam blog on your own?
The challenges to such an approach are that you have to spend sometime in writing posts. It has to have contents which are interesting to users. And if you have a nothing to sell then there are only so many ways you can write about it. So what do you do?
Our spammer here ( http://www.blogger.com/profile/1424846 ) have written a script which automatically writes post which are random combination of words designed to target search engines for spam related queries. He then creates multiple links to the same content, randomized in order and in content to fool search engines. And then he creates several such blogs.
And he has many such blogs!
Why take all the trouble? He has ads on the site, guess by whom?
Interestingly I saw a post on JRoller ( http://jroller.com/page/cyblogue/weblog?anchor=last_thing_you_want_is ) complaining about a Spam Blog in JRoller. It was followed by a comment that Rick has blasted the blog into oblivion. Looks like Rick needs to be cloned for Blogspot 
However such vigilantism may be ok in the small scale. I doubt even with hundreds of Rick clones they can eliminate such blogs from blogspot.
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May 31st, 2005 at 6:04 pm
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June 2nd, 2007 at 9:06 pm
This is the new problem that the blog networks have to face. I have recently set up a blog network bp-blog.com as an idea of making money using user driven content and providing a share to the bloggers with the AdSense API. There are around 100 blogs there now. Almost all of them are spam. I found some blogs with the posts containing random text and deleted them. I found some blogs with nice articles without any links and I thought that the author is poor at writing articles. After some day I found another blog with same articles. I viewed the source of the page in the browser and I found that each post contains 10-20 invisible links (like ). Now I am manually deleting them and working on a plugin for wordpress mu to block comment as well as blog spam. I using a local database of black listed links, IPs, SURBL.org and ProjectHoneyPot.org to effectively block spam. Unfortunately that the links on my site are not listed in both the surbl.org and projecthoneypot.org. Hope my own database will evolve in time. I found your blog, while searching for WP Hooks documentation. I have to read lots of post in your blog. Hope those will be helpful to me.