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 motivat ed by the profitability of hosting ads. Splogs infiltrate the blogo sphere 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 the y are begin- ning 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 upda te pings from splogs. This will considerably reduce computational require- ments and manual efforts at downstream services (search engines) and involve the community in detecting spam blogs.