Part of my daily work is removing spam submissions from Netscape.com. The majority of these are Members submitting multiple sites of the format something-something-something.blogspot.com (runner-up: *.info). The “content” on these pages is usually taken from free article sites like Articlesbase (nofollow). The articles are free to be republished as long as the reciprocal link at the bottom to the author’s website is intact. Free hosting + free content + Google Ads = Profit! The ads are context sensitive. Want to get insurance ads? Post insurance articles. You still need to get your site found though, so you submit it to a site with an astronomical PageRank like Netscape.com.

Why should I be the one that has to deal with this crap though? Can’t Google do something about it? Google has a vested interest in not doing anything about this. If they get a click on an ad, even if the site is crap content, they’re still making money. I wouldn’t be surprised if more clicks are on splog ads since the content is so awful—I often think “I could run a better splog network than this”. Google will not fix this problem and Blogger will continue to fill with shit sites.

If you run a legitimate Blogger blog, I suggest you get out now. WordPress.com has migration utilities to assist you and it isn’t full of garbage because you can’t run ads on their free version. If you’ve got a commercially viable blog, you should be paying for your hosting anyway. I try to do things right the first time which is why I intentionally didn’t go with a free service when I started this, my first blog. My hosting only cost me $3/mo. and the side-effect of having a unique URL is at least an air of legitimacy.