How to have a popular blog

There is apparently an Australian site out there that tracks popular blogs under its umbrella. One of its users didn't flip a switch to block spam comments, and so he is getting a lot of... well, spam comments. The issue is that the site to rank blogs looks at how many comments a site has (likely within a timeframe I imagine) and uses that to show how popular it is - but that doesn't account for comments that are all spam.
From an article about it:

A BigPond spokesman said it was now reviewing the use of comments as a measure of a blog's popularity with some changes planned in a revamp of BigBlog later this year.

"The popularity of a BigBlog will be based upon page views, not comments, so this is a lesson we've learnt from phase one of what is an ongoing project for us," he said.

Another lesson they are going to have to learn? Tracking "real" pageviews under whatever this new system they roll out. With the comment issue, spammers could flood the comments of a blog and get a high ranking. If it is just a matter of pageviews, there are ways around that as well.

Gaming the system is certainly something that spammers, by default, tend to be good at.

Posted by Eric at September 27, 2006 02:31 PM | TrackBack