I haven’t been keeping good track of my website, but recently I’ve been looking around because I’m going to put up a re-design. When I was looking at my web stats, I noticed that I have ~80 “links from an external page,” where the supposed page is actually an mp3.

I don’t really know much about pingbacks, but my basic understanding of them is this: Person A writes a blog post. Person B links to it in one of their blog posts. Their two sites talk, and Person A’s blog puts up a pingback link which notes that Person B is mentioning them.

What I’m wondering is this: Could someone be trying to use my site for a kind of pingback link scam? Like sending a false indication that I’m linked somewhere, so that a link to their page will appear here?

I don’t have any kind of regular readers who could answer this, but maybe someone will magically wander in and help me out. In this case there are two MP3s, one address is listed as “http://www.angrygwn.mu.nu/archives/Dec_21_2005.mp3” but it re-directs to “http://stevejanke.com/archives/Dec_21_2005.mp3.” You can see it’s referring to stevejanke.com, Steve Janke is mentioned in the mp3. The other link is to “http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~wang/Stuff/empty.mp3” where you can’t load the mp3 because they disabled hotlinking. The domain for that is Trinity College Dublin School of Mathematics.