Pingback spam really is on the rise.
This morning I was blogging. After finishing a post, I checked my comments, and found 4 spam comments that hadn’t been there 5 minutes ago.
So I checked all my other blogs. They had plenty of spam comments.
What kind of spam comments?
Pingbacks.
Ugh.
Here are snapshots from my own blogs.
First of all, though. What is a pingback?
This blog defines it pretty well.
Pingback spam is a comment that appears as a result of a link on another blog pinging your blog. Although many pingbacks are legitimate (as many comments are legitimate), there appears to be a rise in pingbacks as a result of feed scraping, which I’ve discussed here and here. Pingback spam is usually pretty easy to spot; the software that scapes the feeds isn’t very creative, so the excerpt is usually an exact quote from what’s been scraped. Sometimes, oddly enough, the quote is from the copyright notice that appears at the bottom of every feed item originating from this site. Pingbacks automate the linking of your site to someone elses — in the case of pingback spam, it’s likely to be a splogger.
It looks like the snapshots I have.
I had just posted the blog post a few minutes ago. Within that short time, I already got 3 pingback spams.
No doubt about it. Pingback spam is on the rise.
WordPress users have noticed.
But what is going to be done about this problem? The blogs I’ve read all recommend installing more spam applications like Bad Behavior. But it doesn’t look like this problem might go away anytime soon, now that spammers have figured out how to get behind the filters.
2 Comments
May 14, 2009 at 10:41 am
This is why I ignore all pings from anyone I do not know. And I think it’s a lazy way of commenting.
May 14, 2009 at 11:00 am
Thanks for the link. The fight against spam is never-ending, but the tools provided with WordPress really do help. Best of luck to you.