Is it blog spam?

I was going to let this pass unblogged, but then Shane blogged about evil trackbacks …

Yesterday a comment appeared on a few-weeks-old blog post. It was gibberish, and contained a URL. Clearly spam that had slipped through akismet.

But wait a minute. It’s a pingback. The URL is the pingback field, not in the text. The URL is a .jp, so it seems likely the post is in japanese. And the fact that it’s gibberish is then down to wordpress sending me the byte stream with an incorrect charset label. So maybe it’s perfectly legitimate.

The only way I can guess is to follow the link, which I refuse to do with spam. And even then, because I don’t speak Japanese, I can only take a guess based on how ad-laden it is. To enlist the help of a japanese speaker would be way OTT.

It doesn’t belong as a comment to my blog, and it doesn’t even work due to charset troubles. But to mark it spam risks convicting an innocent blogger. Conclusion: best just delete it.