At its core, my first impression of SocialRank niche websites was that it was little more than a WordPress splog scraping my content based upon keywords used and giving some kind of relevant or irrelevant ranking based upon some internal algorithm.

It is still my content appearing on a 3rd party site, in the same way as one of the millions of kubrik themed sites that just grab keyword based feeds from Technorati.

As I have said in the past, I license my content as GPL, so am quite happy for people to repurpose it, and hopefully if they provide a link a little traffic finds it’s way back to my site.

There is however one thing I absolutely detest

Don’t Use Pingback / Trackback When Syndicating / Splogging My Content

If you site contains no original content, if you are not entering the “blogging conversation”, I don’t want you to spam the hell out of me with trackbacks and pingbacks.
I sent an email to SocialRank to switch off the pinging, the pinging continued with my email box full of ping notifications. All I received in response to my email was an invite to their beta.

Would you join the beta of a company effectively hiting you with trackback/pingback spam?

I don’t see them anymore, I have told Spam Karma to blacklist them just like any of the other splogs.

On the other hand I read today an interview Ben did with SocialRank.

This seems similar to the Quechup debacle at the beginning of last month where an over enthusiastic viral referral system effectively destroyed the social network before it gained any traction. The first page of results in Google only mention negative things about Quechup – I assume they rebranded.

I never accepted an invite to Quechup, but I assume within the terms and conditions somewhere they gave some notification that when you provide your friend’s details, they would automatically send email invites. Thus the emails probably weren’t spam, and looking back through the few emails I received, were not to my knowledge in any way illegal, with a clear opt-out option, company details, a nice link through to a company privacy policy etc. In fact iDate who own Quechup issued a press release 2 weeks ago explaining the changes made to the feature to stop people making mistakes when inviting people.

I think the problem comes with people so used to how Facebook and LinkedIn have implemented these in my opinion quite dangerous address book sharing features, they assume every site works the same way, even if the other site actually had a similar but different feature well before LinkedIn and Facebook. The iDate press release mentions having this feature since 2005.

With SocialRank it is different. They are the ones filling my email box with pingback after pingback proclaiming that they scraped my content.

I don’t regard them as a stinking splog, they are still linking back to the original source with a followable link, but currently they are more annoying than Quechup invites just 1 month ago.

When I link to a Wordperss blog, most of the time I can just use pingback which autodiscovers the trackback URL for any blog I link to within a post and sends a trackback to the blog owner.

On some WordPress blogs they have removed the pingback code to reduce spam. Fair enough I enter a trackback URL if I want to give them a signal that I have written something that might be worth their while reading.

On Blogger there are now linkbacks powered by Google blogsearch, so you can tell who has linked to you. A Blogger user can also send a trackback using a convenient script.

If I am sending a trackback to many other blogging platforms, I normally have to grab a specific trackback URL from their posts. It is a little inconvenient, but I still do it.

Typepad & Moveable Type Users – Are You Whispering About Me?

That is what it seems like anyway…

Typepad & Moveable Type blogs can receive trackbacks, so I am sure they are meant to be able to send them as well, maybe with auto detection but I have a feeling they don’t offer that functionality.

So you probably have to send a trackback manually filling in a field in your posting form. I am not going to register with Typepad just to write a tutorial on how to do it, but I would gladly link to one.

Having just done a search, I couldn’t find a simple tutorial teaching people how to send a trackback from Typepad to different blogging platforms. It seems like a no-brainer article to have on the first page of results.

So please someone write a tutorial so I can link to it

This blog post was inspired by Amy, maybe she will write a great tutorial. She was lucky I saw her link in Technorati, but I am sure I miss half the times people link to me, either because they link to my domain rather than my content, or because they don’t send trackbacks.

Alternatively one of Mikes students should do it, or maybe lots of people. Mike has to rest even though he is back home, so I refuse to link to him if he writes it.

We are looking for a comprehensive write-up with screenshots.