Google Blog Search’s People Search Spam Problem

Jan 10, 2007 at 8:42am ET by Danny Sullivan

Last month, I wrote Public Spam/Splog Report over on my personal blog, begging Google to stop the "people search" spam that’s been clogging my Google Blog Search feeds with junk off Google’s own Blogger service. Today, I noticed Steve Rubel writing recently on the same issue.

Steve gives you the screenshots of how the junk shows up on Google Blog Search. My post goes into depth on the redirection and scraping that’s going on. End of story, the junk needs to step. C’mon, Google — fix it.

FYI, here’s today’s latest junk out of my newsreader from just today:

Kill it!


Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle, can be found on Facebook, Google Buzz and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

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3 COMMENTS ON Google Blog Search’s People Search Spam Problem

Ian McAnerin, January 10th, 2007 at 10:31 pm ET:

I agree – it’s also making my Google Alerts (one of which is set to my name/site) almost totally useless.

Fix it, guys. It’s ruining your other services.

Ian


searchbug, January 11th, 2007 at 4:06 am ET:

I run legitimate people search site – SearchBug ( http://www.searchbug.com/ ). We have been online for more then 10 years.

I subscribe for Google alerts for “searchbug” keyword and I am getting daily messages with about 10 to 15 new “people search” spam blogs that use our brand name (registred US trademark) in the title or body of the blogs.

Later those blogs start regirecting users to this webiste: people-search.com. Here are some examples:
civazajag.blogspot.com/index.html
bafijixotuh.blogspot.com/index.html

This should stop!


birdswitharms, January 16th, 2007 at 11:12 am ET:

My site, (http://www.peoplesearchnews.com) discovered this same issue weeks ago.

We wrote an article which lists several resources for reporting fake blogs. You can read that article here: http://www.peoplesearchnews.com/technology/what-you-can-do-to-stop-fake-blogs/

Also, a group of us has gotten together and reported all of these blogs numerous times. So far, I can see no results from our efforts.

Additionally, the only legitimate update I received was the press release from Searchbug.com, last week.

Lastly, has anyone considered these blogs will affect our domains? I have noticed that most of the links within these blogs are no-follows except for those pointing to “competitors” domains.

I hope this problem is fixed soon.


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