Almost All Pings into Technorati Are Blog Spam

Technorati hasn't updated their state of the blogosphere data in a long while. This probably because the numbers really don't matter any more. The field has widened now to include channels like Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Qik and dozens more places where people create content.

Still, they did quietly give BusinessWeek some updated figures.

Technorati now says they have indexed 112M blogs with 120,000 new ones being added each day, according to founder David Sifry. About 13M blogs have updated in the last 60 days. Alarmingly, some 99% of all pings to Technorati are spam.

So what does this mean? That Google is losing the war against spam blogs, despite their best efforts.

Comments

[Dawson Jones]

99%... thats amazing! I know Technorati is slowing dying... but 99% spam??? I would think 80% MAX... amazing...

[Ben Tremblay]

Without discounting the validity of that rather sad statistic: what comes to mind is how spam blogs are near-religious in updating and pinging. So however many of them there are (an equally dismal factoid), they are over-represented.

Dang ... I was hoping there'd be an up-note in there somewhere. No such luck.HeyHo!

--bentrem

[Ed Kohler]

There is more than one way to move a market. Who cares how many splogs there are if you never encounter them?

Google could do a better job preventing people from creating splogs, but a better option may be to do a better job of filtering ping spam.

For example, I could care less how many emails sent across the web are spam as long as they don't end up in my inbox.

[David Sifry]

Steve,

I think it is important to understand what this means -

We often get spammers who ping us incessantly iwth the same URL - 10, 20 or even 100 times PER SECOND. They think it will get them into the index or something, who knows? Well, we drop all of those pings on the floor.

Of course, those pings do count as spam pings, because we do have to spend some time figuring out that they are spam. But that doesn't mean that the blogosphere is overrun with spam.

There's a lot of crap that we can identify very very quickly as spam and eliminate it before it ends up in the indexes.

Dave

[Kevin Burton]

This is really strange timing. I happened to publish our stats on ping spam just yesterday:

http://blog.spinn3r.com/2008/01/blog-ping-and-s.html

93% of our pings are spam....

Kevin

[Kevin D Goodman]

I am glad to see the issue getting attention. I have seen so much shameless blog promotion. Google has to do something or Adsense will loose credibility and google dollars.

[Bittenbydesign.com]

I have found a lot of the general spam into my clients forums, sites, classifieds, and general directory sites have been for the majority in the spam category. And most of them being the same site blasted over and over at the site. Once you figure a way of filtering them out, it still involves spending time keeping on top of it all.