My posts often receive pingbacks – these are other blogs that have referenced my post. However, I still insist on manually authorising these, like comments, because they too can be prone to spam.

These spam sites are often WordPress sites which are set up with plugins installed that are designed to trawl and integrate content from other sites. They then plaster adverts all over their site and then leave the site to make revenue. They become popular because of this back-linking to the other sites.

And, visiting them it is often obvious that they are a spammer due to a total lack of its own content and, my personal favourite, visting the “About” page and finding this…

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

Yep, that’s the default content of this page after a fresh installation of WordPress – they can’t even be bothered to fill this in.

So, here’s an example. My review of the Logitech C510 webcam got a Pingback from a website named “Review Central”. Yep, no original content, no effort in the site design, adverts everywhere, a default “Meta” list in the sidebar, and the aforementioned “About” page. It’s spam, and marked as such.

Update: Ahh, the irony. The same day I published this post, I received a pingback on it from a spam site picking up on me mentioning the Logitech webcam. So they’re now proudly displaying my post on their spammy site which complains about shoddy spam sites who just publish other people’s posts. Nice.