Have you noticed the increase in pingback comment spam recently? Our mod panels are full of the stuff.

Much of it seems to come via a gentleman by the name of Elliott Back, who is listed as having a legitimate web design and software business, and writes a blog about Cornell University.

All very respectable, you might think. Then why write the kind of software that monitors keywords in other people’s posts, presumably through Technorati, then scrapes a section of the post automatically onto an untreated Wordpress install and sends a pingback to the unfortunate author?

Some sites now lift whole articles for reprint, without permission. Inevitably, the posts are surrounded by great wodges of Adsense blocks.

This is what his website has to say :

I’m not some city slicker looking for a fast buck, or a country boy who’s never seen w-e-b-twooo-point-oh. I do what I like, and I do it well. Whether it’s branding, web presence, search engine optimization, blogging, coding, service-oriented architecture, java, php, facebook development, rich internet applications, mobile developement, web services, thick-client guis, debugging, q&a, testing, or documentation, I’m your man.

He’s obviously a man of talent who could be a useful presence around the web, especially for bespoke pieces of software for particular tasks. Why then the dark side, ripping off other folk’s work for personal profit?

Oliver White at Knee High to a Grasshopper has a word for this flighty freelance :

“People like those who use the plugin that Elliott Back distributes are destroying the web, site owner by site owner. Its impact may be low, but it is those small-time publishers that make the internet such a diverse and wonderous place that it is. Tell me, why the f**k do you get to repeat my hard-worked content for your own f***ing gain? And without my permission?”

He now has many imitators, but his name crops up time and again in the pingbacks. These are all caught in the spam trap, but by then the content appears as duplicate material in the search engines.

Of course, quoting a segment of another’s post with link back is standard procedure on the web, but only as part of a freshly written piece which develops the original’s argument. It’s the machine-like mass production aspect of his method that makes it so pernicious.

Has anyone successfully scuppered this software’s ability to scrape their sites?

Update : Elliott Back has emailed me to say, “I wrote a plugin to import RSS items as blog posts because I wanted to aggregate my and some families members’ blogs into a single feed. I released it, spammers picked up on it, and now it’s killed but some people are still where did they get it from?) using it for spam. If you find spam sites, please DCMA them and get rid of them for good.”