Google's Blogger Hit By Huge Influx of Redirect Spam

Unsatisfied with simply using blogs as a tactic to trick the unsuspecting into clicking on Google ads, spammers have turned to a new technique to bait searchers - funneling Web traffic to people search sites.

In the last few weeks spammers have set up hundreds of Blogspot blogs that link to posts by popular bloggers. Like ordinary spam blogs, this new variant of splogs are designed to attract web searchers. However, they're much more nefarious.

Each blog posts automatically redirects the searcher to one of a handful of different people search engines that I don't care to link to. People-Search.com is among the most popular. You can spot these and others in dozens of Google Blog Search results for my site and others.

All of these new spam blogs are powered by Google's Blogger platform. However, they are getting indexed by all of the relevant search engines, including as of this writing Technorati. Google needs to put a stop to these immediately. It seems easily remedied if they can mine the blogs for the redirecting code.

Technorati Tags: Blogspot, Google, Splogs, Spam

Comments

[Michael.NET]

Oh perfect...and I just signed up on Blogger. Maybe I should just set up Wordpress on my domain. I like the idea of offloading my blog though.

[engtech]

I was searching today for a firefox greasemonkey script to ignore redirects so that I could report these.

Friggin' pain in the butt.

Unfortunately because the blogger "flag this" button is javascript, there's no easy way to report these sites to the blogger team.

I agree that they should strip meta redirects all together.

[Leon]

Getting rid of redirects and finding another way to 'flag' blogs would help. There are automated controls in place but they can screw up legitimate blogs. I had to get Blogger to take one of my blogs off the blacklist when it was deaclared a spamblog. I would like to see more sites banned from Google for linking to spamblogs.

[Lorelle]

I also discovered this evil and found that these can be reported via Google’s Report Spam. Thanks for spreading the word as we need to work together to fight off the dark side of the force. ;-)

[Tony Cohn]

I hate those blogs too. We covered them in a recent article on our site in case anyone is interested. There actually are a few places where you can report them to. You can read our article at
http://www.peoplesearchnews.com/technology/what-you-can-do-to-stop-fake-blogs/

[boardinsnowman]

In failing to set up a redirect from my blogger blog to my real blog I found this site. I understand the problem and it seems they've addressed it. But I've encountered this problem. As I browse the web I want to comment on some blogger-blogs. Since I have a gmail it knows who I am and signs me in. But I want (like normal) to have the link of my name go to my own hosted blog--not my junk blogger one. I hate that spammers runied it for the rest of us.