Scraper blog site pingbacks - are they bad?

I got one of my blogs linked to on Engadget a while back and I got a bunch of pingback links from scraper blogs. Should I approve those pingbacks or just delete them?

I assume the link still counts regardless of whether I approve or not. It's just a question of whether I want to allow them to show up in my comments or not.

Any arguments for or against?

Also... some of the sites show up as legit and the others appear to go in as spam. But almost all of them are just copying content.

Thoughts?

 

Google claims that you cannot and will not be penalized for factors that are external to your website, including spammy inbound links. The rationale behind this is simple: if they did allow external factors to harm you, it would be too easy for malicious competitors to hurt your business by creating thousands of links that pointed to your website from bad neighborhoods.

I have first-hand experience of this. About 18 months ago I wrote a large and extremely high-quality SEO article. I always include high-quality outbound links in my articles, but I was also careful to include links that pointed to the website’s homepage and to the article itself.

In a matter of weeks the article was scraped and posted on spam blogs. I made two surprising discoveries:

1) Google indexed these copies of the article, even though they were word-for-word identical to the original copy on my website (which was of course also indexed, and given a much higher priority in the search engine rankings).

2) The links in the scraped articles that pointed back to my website (and to the original copy of the article itself) showed up in my Google Webmaster account.

In other words, not only did Google count these links as genuine, it did so with an article that was patently scraped. I mean, this is beyond plagiarism: these guys simply copied and pasted my article onto their own blogs.

Conclusion: my personal experience is that links obtained through spammers scraping your content are unlikely to hurt you, and might even help. In my case they clearly helped, and with virtually no cost.

 

I'm going to say they'll hurt you, but not for the reason you might think. If I go visit a blog and I see those pingbacks to scraper blogs, and it's usually pretty easy to tell, it makes me think the person who owns the blog doesn't pay attention to what's going on with their blog, and I never visit again. Since the point is to attract visitors, and hopefully commenters, I'd delete each and every one of them; heck, I do delete them all.

Just my opinion, though.

 

So that way you still get the link but then they don't get the return link?

 

Thank you for this.... I never looked at it from a visitors point of view before and of course, you are right. I would do the same as you. Click away.

Thankfully, I always delete pingbacks.

Graham

 

I usually delete them or remove their link.

 

Exactly. Why give them any juice from you? That, plus some of your visitors might think about seeing who wrote about you, and will be disappointed to go to a scraper site to see it was actually something from you.

 

Personally I don't like to see pingbacks or trackbacks on a blog. If someone has copied your content and linked to you of their own will then take full advantage of the link and don't give them a link back.

 

Yah, I decided to take the linkback from a few of the other legit sites that linked to me but deleted all the others.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

 

Pingback is not a good idea for me really.. Why show pingbacks when in fact they are reading the original content?

When i learned about Pingbanks or Linkback or whatever you call.. I started to try clicking on those links.. but i realized.. they are the same content.. It doesn't help me.. It just waste my time and space on the website..

As a final word, "Pingbacks are a waste of web-estate space". If you disagree, why?