Thursday, July 14, 2011

Bogus Links

If you click on "links to this post" at the bottom of my previous post, you get a long list of purported links. So far as I can tell, almost all of them are bogus—they don't actually have anything to do with the post. I don't know if they are due to some sort of glitch in the software that produces the link or if they are an attempt to get traffic to their blog by pretending to connect to mine.

Does anyone here know what is going on? Is there something I can do about it easier than going through the whole list trashing all the bogus ones, which could take quite a while?

For what it is worth, the chief offenders appear to be:

Anti-Dismal
Truth to Power
MTEF is the Bayesian Heresy


4 comments:

Joshua Kronengold said...

Well, you can turn off backlinks.

It's easy enough to generate a real list of backlinks via google; if it's trivially spammable, a postable list of backlinks doesn't help much.

Paul Walker said...

As the writer of Anti-Dismal I'm guessing its because your blog is on my "Interesting Blogs" list in the sidebar and link is in fact to the sidebar not to an actual post. I have the same thing occurring with blogs that have similar list in which Anti-Dismal appears. Its easy to fix I will just delete you from the list.

Seth said...

Or add a nofollow directive.

David Friedman said...

I've turned off "show backlinks," which hopefully will solve the problem. Better if there were a way of showing only the backlinks that are really responses to a post, but I gather that isn't an option.

Thanks everyone.