Email sent to google follows:

To whom it may concern at Google,

My name is Marco van Hylckama Vlieg. I am the creator of a piece of software I wish I was never 'forced' to create. It serves no purpose, it doesn't make the internet any better, it simply does something that could have been completely irrelevant. The tool I'm talking about is Pivot-Blacklist, an anti-spam package for the well known weblog software called Pivot (www.pivotlog.net). It blocks comment spam, trackback spam and referral spam. As you know, weblogs are the personal homepages of the 21st century. They are about people. They are our online presence. They are about communicating with the world. What they are NOT about is unsollicited marketing activities, unless the owner of the weblog has decided to allow some space on his/her site for commercial purposes, like many sites do with Google Ads for example.

Affiliate program available

A small group of people on the internet disagree. They feel they can abuse our homes on the web by bluntly entering it like an unwanted guest, almost like a burglar even. When coming back to our weblogs after a referral and/or comment spam attack it feels like someone entered our house and dumped a truckload of garbage right into our livingroom. We feel used. Abused even. Sometimes, if certain servers host a lot of weblogs it's almost like a DOS attack. I've seen examples of hosts almost (or completely) going down under massive spam attacks.

Why are they doing this to us? This is the question that pops up in the heads of thousands of webloggers worldwide when they find out they've been spammed again and are forced to go and clean up the mess. My tool protects at least one group of webloggers against these ruthless internet abusers but many are left unprotected. Those who are using standard hosted tools such as LiveJournal are even completely helpless against the whole phenomena.

The reason people are filling our reaction forms with unwanted garbage and leaving our referral lists full of dirty virtual footprints with site names a lot of us would NEVER want to be associated with is ... you! It's Google! It's the pagerank and the position in Google's search results when entering certain strategic keywords. For this purpose only this group is willing to make the online life of thousands and thousands of webloggers miserable.

The people who can do something about all this shouldn't be guys like me, working late hours to write software, constantly trying to stay ahead of the latest spamming techniques. The people who can make a difference are the Google people themselves. You!
I've always known Google as a nice and very innovative enterprise on the internet. All Google's products just rock. Search done right. Non intrusive advertisement done right, Free webmail done right. And the list of innovations goes on. All of your products clearly indicate that Google is a company that's in it for more than just the money.

As far as weblog spamming is concerned you have already taken an important step against it in with the nofollow attribute. Not bad at all. However, intelligent as the Google staff probably is, they will probably know this approach will have a very limited result for a long time to come. As long as there are abandoned blogs, guestbooks and other interactive systems on the internet that aren't being updated to use your new nofollow attribute there will STILL be plenty of incentives to spam. Spammers are like hunters who shoot at insects with double barreled shotguns. They don't care about annoying 1000 blogs that have the nofollow attribute installed by pointlessly spamming them if it means they'll hit 10 blogs that don't use it. It will STILL increase pagerank and search engine positioning. This reality is why I think the nofollow attribute won't really make much of a difference in ending comment / referral spam.

In my humble opinion the solution could be much, MUCH simpler than forcing the whole internet to go and modify our systems to support the nofollow attribute. In the past months while working on Pivot Blacklist I've learned that spamming is done by a relatively small group of people. Ridiculously small even. The same names and texts keep coming back every day, on every unprotected board. The damage done however is substantial. People are annoyed, time better spent on deleting spam or coding anti-spam tools is wasted, bandwidth is wasted and to add to that, Google's search engine quality is affected as well. I strongly believe that a group of, let's say, ten people maximum in your offices could completely take away the incentive to spam any interactive site on the internet by simple more actively banning sites involved in referral / interactive comment abuse on the internet from what they are doing it all for: Google. It really isn't hard to find out who are the abusive parties on the internet. Even easier, the lists of culprits are readily available for you at repositories such as www. surbl.org and at the central comment spam clearinghouse by Jay Allen (http://www.jayallen.org/comment-spam/)

Having said all this, my question is simple: When is Google going to act? When is Google, being the premier search engine on the internet going to take it's responsibility and deal with the second most annoying problem on the net, right after email spam?
I hope Google will not walk away from this problem but deal with it instead. I know you can.

Sincerely,

Marco van Hylckama Vlieg

PS: this is an open letter to you, posted on my weblog at the following URL:

http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/
archive/2005/02/08/open_letter_to_google

Note: I've sent a trackback to the Comment Spam Manifesto for this posting. If you agree: write about it! react! send trackbacks, to Adam Kalsey's post and / or to this one!