Sping is short for " spam

ping Ping may refer to: Arts and entertainment Fictional characters * Ping, a domesticated Chinese duck in the illustrated book '' The Story about Ping'', first published in 1933 * Ping, a minor character in ''Seinfeld'', an NBC sitcom * Ping, a c ...

", 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 ...

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 land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

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 Dave Sifry is an American software entrepreneur and blogosphere icon known for founding Technorati in 2004, formerly a leading blog search engine. He also lectures widely on wireless technology and policy, weblogs, and open source software. Ea ...

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 Seo or SEO may refer to: * Search engine optimization, the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines Organisations * SEO Economic Research, a scientific institute * Spanish Ornithological Society (''Socied ...

blogger, Sébastien Billiard, in an article titled "Spam 2.0". Original post:

References

External links

As Blogs Grow, So Does Spam
Christopher Heun, ''

Internet Week The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

'', April 21, 2006 Spamming Blogging Black hat search engine optimization {{web-stub

See also

References

External links