Ping Spam

I'm addicted to clicking the 'Next' button on the Long Tail page, and in doing so I've noticed an annoying phenomenon. Ping spam.

Ping spam is people who ping the various pinging services with links to bogus blog entries. Entries like:

online poker
via online poker: Please check the sites about online poker texas holdem online poker

Probably 10% of the ping updates I get are ping spam.

They're doing it because of sites like mine, that take the Ping data and display it to users - I should really add 'nofollow' support to the hyperlinks, but really it's not so much about getting search engine ranking as it is about getting their links in front of people's eyes.