Spamback: Automated trackbacks/pingbacks by sites
by SuperRaJJ on Aug.06, 2007, under Blogging, Technology, WordPress
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Last updated: 08th August, 2007
I have been observing a disturbing new kind of nuisance or shall I say traffic stealing, article stealing, viewer stealing breed of spammers who have some kind of Spamback (a play on pingback/trackbacks that are generally associated with genuine bloggers linking back to you) bots that are automatedly scanning your content and picking it up and posting it on their sites as content and giving you a link back.
Now, I know many of you would say that it is what we all tend to do. Well, I know. In fact, I also do that a lot. But what I do and what they are doing are totally different things.
What I generally do is, I pick up content that I want to link to. Write a little about it myself and then quote from the actual content and then send them a link from right within my post.
What they do (or what I have seen them do), they just show some content or all of it from your site and then post it on their site without any touch of humanity. Although they do provide a link back to our content, it does surprise me how they tend to steal content just like that.
I just want everybody to watch out for these new kind of bots that are traversing the length and breadth of the blogsphere and putting up your content on their websites just like that.
What I think is, these could be stealing from the RSS feeds. Even though I have some plugins that I installed to prevent all this, these are smart little critters that are bypassing even these plugins.
So, the next time you find your content on other sites, check it out thoroughly for any signs of automated content (stealing and ) delivery to the site.
This way you can help the existing plugins to work against these sites.
I leave you with some sites that have posted my content, but I don’t think or even feel, are automated content thiefs. Spambacks.
Here is the list of a couple of sites. Now, I am not going to post too many links since this will make them comeback for more.
http://playstation3.tolnetwork.com/9-playstation-3-august-1-2007-1146-am
http://cancer.medtrials.info/../broccoli-’stops’-prostrate-cancer/
(UPDATE:Removed the links to these sites so that I don’t provide them with their needed traffic!)
If you feel these are legitimate linkbacks and not spambacks, then I might be wrong after all! Tell me more of what you think.
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2 Comments for this entry
1 Trackback or Pingback for this entry
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All Pumped Up! » Blog Archive » Another kind of spamming, Referrer Spam
August 9th, 2007 on 1:15 pm[...] pages: Spamback: Automated trackbacks/pingbacks by sites Blogging spams types of spams WordPress addthis_url = [...]
August 7th, 2007 on 8:29 pm
I’ll chime in here and say that it is almost certain these sites are scraping from your RSS feed. The reason is that the pattern you described is one that is becoming very common among spam bloggers. Scrape the entry, link/ping the original post, gain search engine traffic, insert other steps here and. profit.
What makes it strange is that a lot of people forgive this scraping because it is attributed, even though it results in yet another abuse of your site. This is one time where attribution is actually worse than being plagiarized.
Sad, but true…
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August 8th, 2007 on 9:31 am
yes jon (if you may, excuse my calling you that jonathan but it’s kinda short!),
you are right. it is possible or shall i say this is the case that these programs or bots, as they are more (in)famously know around the net, could be scrapping my RSS feeds.
BTW, I just noticed that a couple of months ago, a plugin that I used for sending all my feed traffic to my centralized feeds at Feedburner by Steve Smith has been taken over my Feedburner themselves.
Also the version that I was using prior to upgrading to v2.2, it is not compatible with this version of WordPress. I’m going over to the new plugin page and I’ll write about it on my blog too.
But yes, the way articles are leeched is surprising, even though they do attribute to you but take away some of your traffic by piggybacking on your site’s popularity!
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