Pinging Technorati Makes Spam
I’m not saying that you should immediately stop pinging Technorati, but maybe I am. If you look at the top searches today, the top 13 and 14 are “Trackback This Post” and “Trackback.” Now, why would regular people be searching for posts to trackback? It’s unlikely that you or I would ever organically enter that term into a blog search engine. However, if you were blog spammer using Technorati’s APIs to automatically gather large numbers of URLs to tracback spam, those would be logical keywords to use. That fact that they appear on the top searches this hour list only shows how much of a problem blog spam has become, and to what extent Technorati is unable to prevent it.
This is ironic in light of the regular State of the Blogosphere reports that Technorati’s Sifry puts out. While Technorati can identify spam blog pings and spam blogs and deindex them, it’s probably harder to selectively turn off their API on the bad guys. If they block certain keywords, they’ll soon find out that “Trackback” and “Permalink” has perfectly legitimate uses as well. And, the computers leveraging their APIs may not be related the computers send trackback spam, thus making it hard to identify which machines are actually doing the dirty work.
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at 2:45 pm and is tagged with sifry, dirty work, bad guys, pings, spammer, technorati, large numbers, permalink, api, urls, extent, search engine, blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on July 2nd, 2006 at 7:43 pm
argh, what’s the solution!? Spam is becoming the cocaine drug cartel of the 00s…