The Substantially Similar Weblog

Those of you reading this weblog through a web browser may notice the “Recent Inbound Links” list on the right side of the screen. This is supposed to track pages that link to this page when people click through to give you a sense of where I sit in the blogosphere. (but see Metadata Overfizzle· for a humorous treatment of this whole obsession).

For the past several weeks, “Paris Hilton” related inbound links keep popping up. When I look back at the sites listed, they don’t refer to my blog at all. So someone (or group of people) have figured out this “inbound link” tracking thing and are creating spurious inbound links—”spam referers,” so to speak. By appearing in the right column on my weblog, these spammers boost their visibility, particularly to search engines like google·, which determine the relevance of a site by how many other sites link to it.

So my piecemeal solution now is to ban any referer that has anything to do with Paris Hilton. If folks have other suggestions, please let me know.

(And, if you’ve been living in a cave for the past month or so: Paris Hilton is a socialite and heiress to Hilton Hotel fortune. An illicit homemade “sex tape” of Paris and her then-boyfriend· has achieved wide distribution over the Net and is apparently in high demand.)

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Δ