Sping is short for "
spam ping", and is related to pings from
blog
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
s using
trackbacks, called trackback spam. Pings are messages sent from blog and publishing tools to a centralized network service (a ping server) providing notification of newly published posts or content. Spings, or ping spam, are pings that are sent from
spam blog
A spam blog, also known as an auto blog or the neologism splog, is a blog which the author uses to promote affiliated websites, to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites or to simply sell links/ads.
The purpose of a splog can be ...
s, or are sometimes multiple pings in a short interval from a legitimate source, often tens or hundreds per minute, due to misconfigured software, or a wish to make the content coming from the source appear fresh.
Spings, like spam blogs, are increasingly problematic for the
blogging community. Estimates from
Weblogs.com and
Matt Mullenweg
Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984) is an American entrepreneur and web developer living in Houston. He is known for developing the free and open-source web software WordPress, now managed by The WordPress Foundation.
After droppin ...
's Ping-o-Matic! service have put the sping rate—the percentage of pings that are sent from spam blogs—well above 50%. A study commissioned by Ebiquity Group and conducted by the
University of Maryland
The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the Flagship un ...
in 2006 confirmed that these numbers are around 75%. Since then, growth in sping has slowed, such that the portion of pings that are spam has dropped to 53%.
The term was popularized by
David Sifry from
Technorati
Technorati was a search engine and a publisher advertising platform that served as an advertising solution for the thousands of websites in its network. Technorati launched its ad network in 2008, and at one time was one of the largest ad network ...
in his February 2006 ''State of the Blogosphere'' report, but was coined initially in September 2005 by a French
SEO blogger, Sébastien Billiard, in an article titled "Spam 2.0".
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See also
*
Spam in blogs
Spam in blogs (also known as blog spam, comment spam, or social spam) is a form of Spamdexing. (Note that ''blog spam'' also has another meaning, specifically when a blog author creates posts without adding any informational or educational value ...
*
Referrer spam
References
External links
As Blogs Grow, So Does Spam Christopher Heun, ''
Internet Week'', April 21, 2006
Spamming
Blogging
Black hat search engine optimization
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