“What’s with all those spam ping-bots?”, says Raymond

Last December, some people started to get annoyed by the pingback-bots, and others were confused by them. What’s the deal with those pingback-bots?

It’s all about fooling the search engines in order to make money, taking advantage of friendly policies at domain registrars to make it less costly an undertaking.

Step one: Register a bunch of domains with a domain registrar that includes a money-back guarantee.

Step two: Set up fake blogs on each of those sites, with different keywords.

Step three: Use a script to search the blogosphere for articles that contain keywords that match your site. (There appears to be a single script that 90% of the spam blogs use, since they all look exactly the same, and have the same bugs!)

… (continues here)

writes Raymond.  Wouldn’t have thought there would have been enough of a dollar in it.  I guess if you can automate the process, you might get economies of scale.  Is there THAT much money in Google’s AdWords advertising?

It’s a pity Google doesn’t seem to take in the original source, as part of PageRank ranking.