We present some updates on the Splogosphere as seen at a pingserver (weblogs.com). This follows our study from a year earlier which reported on splogs in the English speaking blogosphere. Our current update is based on 8.8 million pings on weblogs.com between January 23rd and January 26th. Though not fully representative, it does give a good sense of spam in the indexed blogosphere.
(i) 53% of all pings is spam, 64% of all pings from blogs in English is spam. A year earlier we found that close to 75% of all pings from English blogs are spings. Dave Sifry reported on seeing 70% spings in his last report. Clearly the growth of spings has plateaued, one less thing to worry about.



(v) Most spam blogs are still hosted in the US. We ranked IPs associated with spam blogs based on their frequency of pings, and located them using ARIN.
1. | Mountain View, CA |
2. | Washington DC |
3. | San Francisco, CA |
4. | Orlando, FL |
5. | Lansing, MI |
(vi) Content on .info domain continues to be a problem. 99.75% of all blogs hosted on these domains are spam. In other words 1.65 Million blogs were spam as opposed to only around 4K authentic blogs! As long these domains are cheap and keyword rich this trend is likely to continue. Sploggers are also exploiting private domain registration services (see here).
(vii) High PPC contexts remain the primary motivation to spam. We identified the top keywords associated with spam blogs and generated a tag cloud using keyword frequency.
We will continue our effort on tackling spam. Our ongoing research on spam is catalogued in our tagged splog resources, or better still check out our tutorial at ICWSM this March!