Blogger Unveils New Features that Might Help Slow Blog Spam

Google’s Blogger team has unveiled two new features that could potentially help slow the amount of spam coming from Blogger/Blogspot hosted blogs.

First, up is the new “flag” feature that allows the Blogger community identify potentially “objectional” blogs. This post offers more details and clarifies that simply having a blog listed as “objectionable” doesn’t mean the blog content will be removed.

In the cases where objectionable content has been identified, the most common action is for the support team to “delist” the blog. This simply means that the blog is not promoted in areas of blogger.com like Recently Updated – but it’s still viewable on the web. The content is not blocked or removed in anyway when the blog is delisted.

As noted above, objectionable blogs will not be removed from the system but I was unable to find any info about if these blogs will be indexed/reindexed differently or if a blog marked as “objectionable” will influence how a blog ranks.

I think it would be useful for the Blogger team to provide access to a list of “objectionable” blogs as well as more info about what criteria they’re using (aside from letting people vote) on how they will assess, “what the community has noted as potentially objectionable.” Also, who makes the final determination if a blog is “objectionable” and what happens if a blog in incorrectly is delisted? Can it be appealed? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for getting rid of blog spam but at the same time it’s important for Google/Blogger to more clearly explain the delisting process.

The second new feature that has been introduced to hopefully reduce blog comment spam is an option for a Blogger user to require word verification for comments people post on a Blogger powered blog. In other words, a person who leaves a comment will need to enter a word or letters into a box to get the comments to post.

Note to Blogger: If you want to let more of your users know about these new services, how about mentioning them on the Blogger home page, login page, and elsewhere? When I checked earlier today, I couldn’t find any info about these new services.