According to Wikipedia, sping is short for "spam ping," and is related to fraudulent pings from blogs using trackbacks, called trackback spam. Blog tools send pings to a centralized service (a ping server) that provides notification of recently published posts or content. Sometimes multiple pings are sent in a short interval from a legitimate source due to misconfigured blogging software. However, some bloggers use spam blogs to send hundreds of pings per minute, artificially increasing their search rankings.
Spings and spam blogs are increasingly problematic for bloggers and those who read blogs. Weblogs and Ping-o-Matic put the estimate of the sping rate—the percentage of pings sent by spam blogs—at over 50%. The number reached as high as 75% in a study commissioned by the UMBC eBiquity Research Group in 2006. A more recent report entitled Pings, Spings, Splogs, and the Splogosophere: 2007 Updates notes that the sping rate has dropped to 53%.
What do you do to prevent spings from cluttering your blog? Do you know of any applications that will detect and delete spings?
Comments