Head of webspam for 6 years Matt Cutts responds to an Information Week article by Thomas Claburn asking if Google’s spam fight is a sham. Matt tried to respond in the IW comment system, but it swallowed his comment and didn’t publish, so he blogged it instead adding that he wished Mr. Claburn had tried to email somebody on the team with his concerns. As someone who has emailed Matt before, I can tell you that at least he does personally respond to emails over there. Still, I don’t email someone at Google every time I write a critical piece about them either so I don’t think that matters that much.

Coincidentally yesterday I received an email from Blogcritics editor Eric Olsen sent to all the blogcritics requesting any blog posts created appear at blogcritics.org first before appearing on blogger’s sites, and his reasoning:

Ironically, due to an aspect of their algorithms set up to catch splogs and other content stealing sites, because a higher percentage than normal of our stories appear elsewhere first, namely home blogs, we keep getting caught in their net. Although they have assured us that they understand our operation and value us as an integral part
of the Internet, it is clear we are going to have to resolve the issue on our end.

Last time I checked Blogcritics.org was a group blog site doing in excess of 50,000 unique visitors a day with over 1,000 contributors and the fact that they are getting caught in the net of Google tells me that Google’s spam efforts aren’t a “sham.”

Splogs are a huge problem and if the secret anti-spam sauce for Google is going after the pages that post them later, that’s fine with me.

Claburn makes a good point about the domain parking page being mostly spam that Matt pretty much says isn’t his department. I’m unable to point to a single parked domain page that was valuable to me as a surfer, but I can see why webmasters and Google would be interested in them.

• Google responds to my nofollow concerns
• Google’s “newfound powers”
• Mullenweg on Comment spam
• Over 90% of blog comments are spam, reports Akismet
• Blame your spam woes on people like this
• Akismet first catch a false positive