Sping

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Sping is short for 'spam ping', and is related to fraudulent pings from blogs using trackbacks, called trackback spam. Pings are messages sent from blog and publishing tools to a centralized network service (Ping Server) providing notification of newly published posts or content. Spings, or ping spam, are pings that are sent from spam blogs, or are sometimes multiple pings in a short interval from a legitimate source, often tens or hundreds per minute, due to misconfigured software, or a wish to make the content coming from the source appear fresh.

Spings, like spam blogs, are increasingly problematic for the blogosphere. Estimates from Weblogs.com and Matt Mullenweg's Ping-o-Matic! service have put the sping rate -- the percentage of pings that are sent from spam blogs -- well above 50%. A study from Ebiquity Group, UMBC confirms that these numbers are around 75%[1]. This figure was confirmed by a mid-2005 study by the University of Maryland[citation needed].

The term was popularized by David Sifry from Technorati in his February 2006 State of the Blogosphere report, but was coined initially in September 2005 by a french SEO blogger, Sébastien Billard, in an article titled "Spam 2.0"[citation needed].

A piece of software called Trackback Submitter has been developed in order to spam trackbacks on Wordpress blogs. It has been extremely effective, forcing bloggers to disable the trackback feature.

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[edit] References

  1. ^ http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/?p=429 study