I’ve had a few people ask me why a certain blog didn’t show up in their FaveBot discoveries. Each of those blogs I was asked about was hosted on Google’s Blogger/BlogSpot service. Unfortunately I had to ban all BlogSpot blogs because of the huge amount of spam (splogs) coming from blogspot-hosted sites. Yes, this is the same problem Mark Cuban wrote about over two years ago when he was considering blocking blogspot blogs from IceRocket:

• Get Your Blogspot Shit Together Google
• A splog here, a splog there, pretty soon it ads up… and we all lose

I’ve long known about the splog problem on BlogSpot but I was surprised to see so many in FaveBot’s blog search results. That’s because FaveBot is using Google Blog Search for searching blogs. I figured that Google’s sophisticated would filter out the splogs. Wrong! So I had to take matters into my own hands. I hated to do it because there are good, legitimate blogs hosted on blogspot. But the signal-to-noise ratio was just way too low.

Banning blogspot probably cut spammy results by 85%. I also had to ban all .info sites. Most bloggers know about all the comment spam that comes from .info and all the splogs on .info which steal other bloggers’ content. Banning .info probably cut another 10% of the spam. I’m also blocking certain other blogs based on their domain or certain words in their urls. If you see spammy results in FaveBot and can identify a pattern in them please let me know.