Towards Spam Detection at Ping Servers

Spam blogs, or splogs feature plagiarized or auto-generated content. They create link farms to promote affiliates, and are motivated by the profitability of hosting ads. Splogs infiltrate the blogosphere at ping servers, systems that aggregate blog update pings. Over the past year, our work has focused on detecting and eliminating splogs. As techniques used by spammers have evolved, we have learned how splog signatures are tied to tools that create them, that they are beginning to be a problem across languages, and that they require a much quicker assessment. Though we continue to address these specific challenges, we discuss our larger goal in this work, of developing a scalable meta-ping filter that detects and eliminates update pings from splogs. This will considerably reduce computational requirements and manual efforts at downstream services (search engines) and involve the community in detecting spam blogs.