What do do about unsavoury inbound links?

April 10, 2007 5:04 AM

Just lately a lot of less than savoury sites having been linking to my blog. What's the story?

Technorati link. Flip back through the last say 7 pages or so. Many but not all of the flotsam are gay porno sites it seems and have just been linking in the last 2 or so weeks. (I did brave looking at one of them which had a captcha screen entry but I could see my site among a list of gay porno sites on page source view). There are more than 10 sites recently and from memory, in the past there may have been 1 or 2 of these in about 18 months.

I'm only annoyed because it obscures the real linkers and sometimes it's a tad difficult distinguishing between the two.

Why do they do it? Does it matter? Should I do anything? Why is this happening at the moment? Is it just me or is this a wider happening? Or is this just a technorati thing?

posted by peacay to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

They do it to get the trackback links, which makes it look to spiders like they are being talked about, which makes them rise in Google-style rankings.
posted by DU at 5:15 AM on April 10, 2007

Yes, it's happening on other sites, too. And yes, it's annoying and upsetting and should be banned. You should have the ability to remove links that you find objectionable or irrelevant.
posted by clarkstonian at 5:55 AM on April 10, 2007

A search on 'trackback spam' will tell you what want to know. The easiest way around it is to put trackbacks into a moderation queue, though if you get a lot, there is software that attempts to detect the spam for you.
posted by MetaMonkey at 6:03 AM on April 10, 2007

You have one of the most beautiful sites on the internet. Is all this linking bad? The more people know about BibliOdyssey the better.
posted by caddis at 7:51 AM on April 10, 2007

They do it to get the trackback links

Wait, BibliOdyssey doesn't use trackbacks, does it? And the links aren't showing up in your comments, right? Sorry if I'm confused, but these seem to just be sites that are deciding to link to you, so how does it help them? Are they just hoping to get clicks from folks checking the Technorati list of links to popular blogs?

You should have the ability to remove links that you find objectionable or irrelevant.

How on earth could you control that?
posted by mediareport at 8:09 AM on April 10, 2007

Response by poster: Perhaps my enquiry was a little naive. Yeah, they just link to Bib and there's no comments involved. I presume that a link to Bib gives some sort of legitimacy to the bogus links that are included around it. I guess I was mostly wondering why is this happening now? Is it just random or is it part of a larger strategy involving many sites, as opposed to the usual level of rubbishy spamoid linking?

How on earth could you control that? I guess you should be able to i.d. them to technorati. Or can you?
posted by peacay at 8:34 AM on April 10, 2007

Oops, sorry for misundestanding the question ealier.

The Technorati blog talks a little about this here, explaining their efforts to remove these links from their index,

...what might have happened is that a legitimate blog linking to you may have been plagiarized to populate a fake weblog. Linking to legitimate blogs is also a tactic to camouflage links intended to fraudulently raise the rankings of spam sites.

If you look in the relevant forum several people ask essentially the same question, but no answer has been forthcoming. So as far as I can tell, there is little you can do but grin and bear it.
posted by MetaMonkey at 8:53 AM on April 10, 2007

Response by poster: Yeah. Thanks. And sorry, I should have looked around the (often pretty useless) technorati site first off.

I actually went trawling back through 20 pages of the Bib technorati page and added all the nefarious links (about 30) to the contact technorati page and then....they just magically disappeared from the fucking contacting page. Oy. Must be a timer thing.
posted by peacay at 9:04 AM on April 10, 2007

I guess I was mostly wondering why is this happening now? Is it just random or is it part of a larger strategy involving many sites, as opposed to the usual level of rubbishy spamoid linking?

I'm not quite sure of the distinction you're drawing here, but it's almost certainly some automated, effectively-random crawling system, and nothing personal, or planned. The concept of 'splogs' (and most spam) is a simple numbers game: a very large amount of very quickly created pages yields some tiny amount of adsense/porn affiliate revenue per page, but enough spam eventually equals a paycheck.

There's an overview of how it all goes down in this wired article.
posted by MetaMonkey at 9:06 AM on April 10, 2007

And, to add another data point, I have been seeing a ton of these only starting up over the last two or three weeks or so. A lot of pseudoblogs like librarybloginfo.info [paraphrase, I don't recall what they're called] copy/paste text from my posts or comments and then link to my blog. I have trackbacks turned on, so I actually see these when they happen and I have noticed they're happening a lot more lately. Technorati sort of cares about stuff like this -- in that it affects how reliable people consider their results -- but not on a case by case basis. So, if it bugs you you can leave out the blogs with "no authority" [i.e. not a lot of inbound links] and you won't see them and dropping technorati an email is probably not a bad idea, but I've rarely found that they do anything but send a "thank for the email!" email.
posted by jessamyn at 9:13 AM on April 10, 2007

Response by poster: These are not splogs created with Bib text. As far as I can tell (and I can see the snips from the technorati page) they have harvested no text; they just insert the link into other seemingly random text. Perhaps this distinction is irrelevant. I just take it for granted that MetaMonkey is right about the monetary purpose (I haven't read that wired link yet).

I ended up posting a new forum message at technorati anyway (after their "Thaaaaaaaanks maaaaaaaaaaaaate" standard email response arrived from my contacting to tell them their contact form page doesn't work well.)
posted by peacay at 9:28 AM on April 10, 2007

Chiming in to say I've seen this too (on the blog of a magazine site I help run). The trackback spam is easy to catch; I'm more concerned about these sites reposting our material as a sort of honeypot, but I guess that so long as we have an RSS feed there's nothing to be done about it.

I gather the text harvesting is a relatively new phenomenon; if you haven't seen it yet, expect to soon.
posted by chrominance at 11:29 AM on April 10, 2007

FWIW, I'm glad you posted this problem because (2nding caddis) your blog is quite beautiful. And interesting. And different.
posted by sfkiddo at 1:26 PM on April 10, 2007