A study by UMBC eBiquity Research Group has found that nearly three out of every four pings to blog ping servers are from spam blogs and more than 50% of blogs pinging weblogs.com are spam blogs. The report can be found here.

Personally this doesn’t suprise me at all given to how much the “Blog and Ping” thing is pushed in by spam blogging promoters and I don’t think for a minute that you can apply these stats onto blogs in general as spam blogs and bloggers tend to apply seperate and more heavy pinging techniques (multiple pings for the one post for example) in an attempt to get their pages indexed and to gain traffic. The criteria under which they classify spam blogs (available here in pdf) whiltst confusingly scientific doesn’t in my opinion give any great certainty to their classification of “spam blogs”. I think realistically at the end of the day only a trained human eye would be able to accurately identify a spam blog.

(via Steve Rubel)