On Spam Removals

As others have noted, we've made good progress in the past six months in reducing the amount of spam on Blog*Spot. One of the tools we're using is an automatic spam classifier. The risk in using a classifier is that we will mistakenly identify good content as spam. This percentage of false positives is both very low and one that we are reducing by further improving our systems.

Because no spam fighting measure is more important to us than protecting the content of our users, we've implemented a number of safeguards to make sure that any mistakes made by the classifier can be corrected. This involves presenting CAPTCHAs or other warnings to the user with instructions on how to contact support to resolve the issue. Our support team usually fixes these problems within one business day.

For certain types of blogs - a fraction of those classified - if we receive no response from the user after a significant period of time, we will mark the site for removal. Even when a blog is in this state, the actual content can still be retrieved and the blog restored for a period of several weeks. We've also put additional warnings in the Dashboard for blogs in this state so that the problem can be corrected quickly.

The steps we've taken have both improved the quality of content on Blog*Spot and improved the Blogger service as a whole. By taking steps like this, we're able to dedicate more storage, bandwidth and engineering resources to our users instead of spammers.