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How Wordpress.com Stays Spam Free

Plagiarism Today has a very interesting article on how WordPress.com (Automattic’s free blog hosting service) stays relatively spam and splog free compared to - for example - Google’s BlogSpot, which PT figures is between 50 and 77% splogs. Part interview with Matt Mullenweg and part conjecture, PT posits that Wordpress’s anti-spam success can be attributed to:

Akismet: Spam trackbacks & comments that point back to Wordpress.com-hosted blogs are conveniently identifying splogs - which can then be assessed and removed.
No Advertising: Banning AdWords removes a most of the motivation to run a spam blog.
Human Support: Mullenweg tells PT that using the “Report as Spam” feature will get a given site looked at and (if justified) removed within an hour.

So - a combination of technological edge, intelligent business decisions, and a corporate committment to root out spam keep WordPress.com clean.

You can add “social networking” to the anti-spam features list as well, as pointed out in the context of LiveJournal, in another PT article: by assuming that the only LiveJournal Friends of a spam blog are also spam blogs (a valid assumption), LJ can take down entire networks of spam blogs rapidly. Effectively, attempting to leverage LJ’s social networking features makes splogs vulnerable.

So - the question of the day is: Why can’t Google’s stable of doctorate-holding engineers figure this out? Google has the skills, the infrastructure, and the data to identify and remove spam, as well as the corporate mandate (”don’t be evil?”) to do so. However, Google also has the ad network whose inventory is kept inflated by BlogSpot’s millions of splogs. So - what do you think? Does BlogSpot need to look for a technological solution, a more active anti-spam community, or a new relationship with corporate-parent Google and AdSense?

EDIT: Using splogs to build PageRank is an issue too. Perhaps its time to consider something like adding no-follow tags to links in blogs that have less than a certain number of non-spam posts? i.e.: once your blog has been around long enough to be reliably identified as not-a-splog, it would graduate to “trusted” status - and links you post would no longer have the no-follow attribute and would contribute to pagerank… just a thought.