Could SpamBlogs Render Technorati Useless?

Staff at Technorati, the blog search engine, are busily preparing the celebrations to commemorate 1 billion links tracked by their search
engine. It’s a terrific achievement for what is one of PSFK’s favorite elements of the blogosphere. Technorati describes its mission as:

Technorati displays what’s important in the blogosphere — which
bloggers are commanding attention, what ideas are rising in prominence,
and the speed at which these conversations are taking place.

Recently we used Technorati to try to conduct research on a few of our articles. The experience left us wondering: A billion links on Technorati, but to where?

Our research was hampered by having to sift through the sheer number of, what we are calling, SpamBlogs – blogs set up to fool the search engine to simple redirect users to ecommerce sites. Try for example one of our searches on Technorati: 3G Phones

After the first page of informative links we were hit with pages and pages of links to SpamBlogs set up by a small and probably clever phone retailing business based just north of London. They include http://nokiauk.blogspot.com/ http://samsunguk.blogspot.com/ http://motorolauk.blogspot.com/. Simple pages listing each product within a post with links through to their ecommerce site.

How can Technorati monitor "what ideas are rising in prominence" when their system is being hijacked?

Right now, there seems to lot of concern about how ad agencies might set up faux blogs to sell their clients’ wares. PSFK thinks it’s more important to address how Technorati and the other search engines deal with these other faux blogs, the SpamBlogs. We sent an email to Technorati’s press office and even left a comment on CEO David Sifry’s blog – but no response so far. Update!! See David’s comment below.

We thought about sending an email to the mobile phone operation in Watford, but then we thought – good for them. They must be the ones celebrating right now.

Technorati