Sping


Sping is short for "spam ping", and is related to pings from blogs using trackbacks, called trackback spam. Pings are messages sent from blog and publishing tools to a centralized network service providing notification of newly published posts or content. Spings, or ping spam, are pings that are sent from spam blogs, 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'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 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 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".