…the total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months. This trend has been consistent for at least the last 36 months. In other words, the blogosphere has doubled at least 5 times in the last 3 years. Another way of looking at it is that the blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago.
In October, Technorati listed about 70,000 new weblogs every day, nearly one per second. As you might guess, not all blogs survive very long– only 55 percent are still active three months after they were started. And not every new blog Technorati tracks is real; two to eight percent of blogs created daily are fake or spam blogs. On average, about six percent of the 1.2 million legitimate posts per day are spam posts, with some daily spam spikes as high as 18 percent of all content.
Fake blogs used to showcase fake stories by fake personas, not marketing schemes. Sifry says the new boom of splogs is “not an overwhelming problem,” but watching the evolution of splogs from a list of product links, to spammy gibberish, to slick promotional posts is pretty troublesome. Sploggers are getting smart to success in the SERPs, even targeting popular bloggers’ names as keywords to ride on the coattails of their ratings.
Representatives of Web 2.0’s affiliated “Spam Summit” plan to focus on quashing the influx of empty content. (And likewise, spammers will focus on cracking any new splog-stopping algorithms they come up with.) The pressing question is– how well can a person, much less a search engine, tell the difference between a blog post that is a false advertisement and one that is an honest promotion? Qualitatively, what difference is there really at all?
