Pingywebedition Q&A

Why this Q&A?
My original post concerning pingywebedition.somee.com was originally centered around reference spam in general. That post got quite some attention and raised more questions, that could only be incorporated by means of a full rewrite. I didn't feel like a rewrite, so I wrote this post as an addition, and I did this in a away that easily allows additions later on. Got another question? Just leave a comment ;-)

Note upfront: the Q&A's below are based on the understanding that I have so far about pingywebedition. Since I cannot look into their systems, maybe I'm off or missing something at some point. I will update this section with any relevant new information.

What is pinging?
Pinging is a way to notify systems (such as blog search engines) that a blog has changed. This enables these systems to only check the modified blog when updating their databases. An analogy: Imagine you want to keep track of all CD's your friends have. You visit them all and make a long list. Then one day later (or even an hour later, or a minute) you wonder whether your list still up to date. You don't know unless you revisit them all. That is a lot of work, day in day out. Wouldn't it be great if they would just call you whenever they bought a new CD? That is the principle of pinging. Of course, the cost of 'visiting' is less (just a web request) but on the other hand, the scale (amount of 'friends') is much bigger (many blogs, many pages per blog).

Can pinging be abused?
Yes, ping systems can be abused. For instance, the pinging frequency can be too big (this would be analogous to one of your friends calling you every ten minutes saying he bought something new - but didn't). Also, the source of the ping can be something other than a blog (ie product vendors) or a fake blog that is only there to promote another site (ie increasing PageRank). This type of blog is called a spam blog (or splog). Spam ping is also called sping. But if you are just running a  legitimate blog you don't have to worry about splogs and spings.

Is pinging useful?
Pinging could be useful yes. Blogger (if you use the right settings) will automatically ping Google's services and weblogs.com. Wordpress has such a function built into it as well. Since many other parties will use weblogs.com as a reference, you might wonder if you need to ping more services.  If you want to, you could do this manually, or try and use a tool that helps you do that. In that case however, you have no control on what's going on. Chances are you are using a scattergun approach that is far from effective and a waste of your scatter ;-).

What IS pingywebedition?
Basically, pingywebedition is a site that offers an online mass 'ping' tool. That is all it does. To promote itself however it uses a few tricks. These have actually nothing to do with its core function. More about these tricks in later questions. Pingywebedition offers you a way to 'ping' a bunch of systems at once, for a lot of websites at once as well. That could save you a lot of work...if you had 100 blogs to ping. Do you? Probably not.

Why is pingywebedition showing up in my blog's statistics?
Requests are being sent to your blog that appear to originate from pingywebedition website. This is called referrer spam. It is a trick. A quite common one as well. Initially, referrer spam worked quite well because some websites published their logs ('statistics'), including the referral urls. This would then improve the ranking of the spamming url. I think in this case however, the site owner expects bloggers to inspect their statistics often, click the url and talk about it.

Does pingywebedition spoil my statistics and can I prevent that?
Yes, pingywebedition (or referrer spam in general actually) spoils your statistics. I you are using blogger, there's not much you can do about that. Maybe you could try and push Blogger/Google itself to improve their statistics or add filters. Or you could try to use Google Analytics. This is however much less fun because far from real time. Another 'solution' is to get so many visitors that the spam counts become insignificant ;)

Why / how is pingywebedition linking to my site?
In short: it is not. Seriously. If you reached pingywebedition.somee.com directly by clicking on the link that appears in your statistics page, it may seem to do so, but try entering the url directly in your browser window and see what happens. What's going on? Well, when clicking the link from inside your blogger statistics page, your browser is passing your blog's statistics page as 'referrer'. This is normal behavior. Servercode that renders the pingywebedition website breaks down this referral url and transforms it into a link to your blog. But this link is only for you to be seen...