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Yahoo!, MSN: ban Google’s Blogger NOW!

Yahoo!, MSN: ban Google’s Blogger NOW!

Duncan Riley> Strange headline you might think? Well it was only a few days ago I was sticking up for Google, but today I change my tune. Google has banned WordPress due to the unfortunate and misguided actions of one person, who got himself mixed up in an attempt to manipulate search engine results. Well, many would argue, fair enough, so heres my challenge to Yahoo! and MSN today: ban all free Blogger sites currently hosted by Google (Blogspot.com domain). Why? well if its fair to punish WordPress for the actions of one, multiply this by the many thousands today who use the free blogs provided by Blogger to manipulate search engines. No, I’m not talking legitimate blogs, I’m talking about “Spam Blogs”, blogs that are generated automatically and are filled with links with the sole purpose of improving search engine positioning. Do we know how many there are? There are 10,900,000 references on Google at the Blogspot domain, we can’t be sure that these are not all “spam blogs” that a polluting search results, so ban them all, Google banned the main page of WordPress, so Yahoo! and MSN, ban Blogspot.com.

Is there a difference? well what’s going on at Blogger is a disgrace that Google has failed to address and pollutes the blogosphere and the internet, and there are thousands of spammers and SEO’s in on the act. Even David Sifry over at Technorati recognises the rise of spam blogs, writing: “There is a dark underbelly to these numbers, however: Part of the growth of new weblogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs – fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites”, in the case of WordPress, one person made a mistake on one site. Yet I suppose WordPress is an easier target, isn’t it?

Some come on Yahoo! and MSN, follow Google’s lead and take a stand against those that seek to manipulate search results, ban free Blogger sites from your results today!

View Comments (8)
  • Right on, Duncan! I posted on my blog the other day some “curious” blogspot blogs and now I know what they were for.

    But sauce for the goose is definitely sauce for the gander (Google in this case). Either they ban ALL such sites or leave them all be.

  • Banning all Blogspot sites would lead many legitimate sites on blogspot, like my own, unable to get as much interest in our blogs as we would like to.

    When confronted with a situation like this you have to think of the effect it will have on the people who aren’t doing anything wrong. There has to be another way to get these spam blogs out of the picture.

    I don’t agree with what Google did with WordPress, but banning all our legitimate blogs is really not an option.

  • I hate to be a party pooper, but WordPress has removed all the offending pages, and is back in the Google index. It was only removed for about a day (if that).
    I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Google pays the bills with AdWords. When people start screwing with AdWords, they’re also screwing with Google’s bottom line. Google has every right to do whatever it takes to discourage search spamming.
    And after WordPress removed the pages in question, they were reinserted in the results in a very timely manner.

  • WordPress driven blogs were not banned – just the main wordpress.org site for 1 day.

  • I think WordPress should have known better, but they goofed, removed the pages and as noted above, they ARE back into the Google SERPs. It wasn’t so much the pages they added, but the hidden links that Google etc. didn’t like. Putting links outside the view of everyone but bots, or those that look at the source code, is a no-no!

    Removing all the blogspot hosted blogs is not the answer, but something does need to be done. A LOT of the blogs are spam, no question about it. I would suggest moving to WordPress, or at least hosting the blog on your own domain if you want to stay with Blogger – hosting is cheap, and if it’s a business, why not host it like you really care about your business anyway?

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