Google still does manual reviews of splogs 1
A while ago, I posted about how Google’s manual review can be detected through your logs. Well, last week I could verify it’s still true - the URL of doom http://www.corp.google.com/~pong/spam/ has appeared in the logs of my other blog splog and it has ceased to exist. But before it happened, the blog has received over 5,500 clicks averaging 50 unique visitors a day and it took Google about 10 months (and a manual review) to catch up with it. So guess I could call Blogger’s bluff with this on their “The steps we’ve taken have both improved the quality of content on Blog*Spot and improved the Blogger service as a whole” bragging - it still takes Google’s manual review.
For those wondering - the blog name on Blogspot has already been taken - giving the new user a jumpstart PR 3 right away! The new content, albeit manually written (it seems), makes even less sense than the original splog - some cheap kiddie verses and stuff. Heck my splog at least was useful for AdSense LOL