Pingback spam

I’ve noticed an increased tendency lately for people to place links to other blogs within their blog posts on a temporary basis. The link only remains for a few minutes but it’s enough to trigger a pingback request in the other blog. I presume they hope that the other blog either automatically accepts pingbacks or that the owner of the blog won’t check the origin of the pingback.

Got a pingback request from someone earlier today who is clearly employing those tactics. Lord knows how long a link to this blog actually existed but it is long gone now — their post was from January 9 but they’ve obviously been updating it regularly to change the links within it as both of the current links are from a week or more after the post was published; one of them is from today. I’m used to seeing that kind of behaviour from spam blogs — you know, those blogs that contain no content of their own but just scrape other blogs for content — but this is the first time I’ve seen it coming from someone who appears to have legitimate blog. Employing that kind of tactic just makes it look as if your blog is junk. After all, if you have to trick people into visiting you, how worthwhile is your content?

I know that this kind of thing has been going on for a few years, but this is my first experience with it coming from a real person. Shame. It might have been a blog I’d have linked to had the pingback been legitimate.