Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Curious

Anyone else notice a rash of mysterious "links to this post" appearing in their blogs? I've found a lot of my posts recently have included several supposed links, sometimes multiple ones from the same site, that have absolutely nothing to do with the posts in question. What's up with this?

8 comments:

  1. Sounds like an automated spam-bot has found your blog. Happened to me once, too. You can fiddle with the posting security settings and require people to sign in, or have a Google account, or something.

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  2. With Wordpress, I get those if somebody has my blog in their blog-roll or a side-bar feed of recent posts (some people have a plugin that shows the something like the five most recent RPG bloggers posts), even if they aren't linking directly in one of their posts. It wouldn't surprise me if Grognardia was in a bunch of blog-rolls.

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  3. Spam. I use to get that with the wordpress blog for Rogue, but I tweaked the settings. Blogger should have some settings for this, I think.

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  4. The way to tell if it's spam is take a look at the sites that are linking in. If it's some bizarre random collection of letters or mentions gambling or sex, it's a spammer. If it's something like RPGBloggers.com or unclebear.com (one of the guys who has a feed in his sidebar), it's an RPG player who likes you.

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  5. Same here, but recently I have link on my blog to my friend's post on his blog, and there is no link there... Strange.

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  6. For the moment, I've just disabled the ability to post backlinks, because I rarely pay attention to them anyway. Also, Blogger isn't the most sophisticated when it comes to such things and, so far as I can tell, disabling them is about the only "security" feature it has.

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  7. I think you can remove each link (I can, but my blog template isn't Blogger basic). If you log in then should be trash icon at the end of each link.

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  8. In this case the backlinks aren't spam generated. It looks like a bug in the "Blog Link" gadget recently offered by Blogger. All of the spurious backlinks on my recent posts are from blogs that use that particular gadget, which updates your sidebar links with the latest post from each linked site. I just posted to the Blogger help group about the issue; we'll see what they say.

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