From time to time, I use technorati to monitor for links to my blog. I intentionally do not allow comments or trackbacks, but often people send me replies in their own blogs.

In technorati, I noticed a link to my blog that wasa quite surprising. Spammers have been around for some time, that take part of your blog posting and add their random shite to it. This was somewhat different.

This spammer quoted an old version of a blog posting. When I wrote that blog positing, I noticed like 10-20 minutes later that I had a fact wrong, so I changed that, even renaming the blog postings title. This spammer still had the old title, that only live for some 20 minutes at most.

So either this spammer was very lucky in crawling my blog exactly at that time

  • or they’ve received a ping for it. I’m usually pinging different services using the ping-o-matic.

I’m convinced at least one of these services allows you to subscribe to all blog posts that contain certain keywords (I’ve seen political web sites linking to posts favourable for their candidate within minutes!), and I have the impression some spammers are doing this. They’re probably sending trackbacks to my site then, hoping that I’ll add a link back to them automatically, or that they’ll at least go up in the Google rankings.

Update: I’ve found out that Google blog search still has that incorrect version of my blog posting; the spammers site heavily links back to Google blog search; the search terms were “computer science”… so apparently they are not indirectly subscribed to my pings, but they’re just polling Google blogsearch every five minutes.