Some suspicious pingbacks this morning tipped me off that there’s a splog (spam blog) automatically copying posts from K-Squared Ramblings to their own site. I sent them a complaint this morning, but they don’t seem to care much: They’ve scraped the RSS feed again, and reposted the same 15 articles nine times today!

It seems extremely likely that they’ll repost this article as well. If you’re reading this on “Attorney Legal Blog” (great irony there), the site is ripping off content from other websites — and clumsily, too!

For the record, the site doing the copying, which I won’t link to directly, is “www – dot – legal – dash – attorney – dot – info”. And it looks like a lot of other sites are being copied…just as badly, repeats and all.

Bad Behavior and Spam Karma do a good job of fighting most of the spam that hits this site, but over the last few weeks I’ve seen a (relatively) new kind that seems to require manual intervention: pingback spam.

It took a long time for spammers to really start abusing pingbacks, because of two things: First, pingbacks require the remote site to link to your site before they can get you to link to theirs. Second, it was just so much easier to abuse trackbacks and ordinary comments. I guess those have gotten locked down enough that it’s worth the effort to target pingbacks now. Continue reading