Hi again,
Since so many people think they're using this technique to affect their rankings, I've reported the sites I've seen in my logs to Google.
Here's a link to the page on Google where you can report such sites. They stress that they will not become involved in hand-to-hand conflicts between webmasters but will use the information to improve their algorithm. I believe that if enough of us complain and we all have different sites, IPs and content, we won't be considered a webmaster who wants to hurt the competition.
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
It's a start, right?
And don't forget to click through to the other thread here at WPW called "And now for something completely different" - bummer that there are two threads going and I can't keep track of one, never mind two... I'm too busy watching my access logs since over at
http://www.idly.org/2003/11/14/porn_...hind_blogs.php they are listing a new IP number and other blog sites that have been linking to control panels and so on... I want to see how long it takes to spread out!
It's a Mad, Mad World...
JMac