Beware Trackback Spam

October 30th, 2007

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On some of my blogs, trackback spam has now become rampant. Not content to simply spam the comments, spammers are now scraping content from the RSS feed, posting it to spam blogs (splogs), and sending a trackback to the violated site in order to pick up a free link.

The problem is that you wouldn’t realize it was spam in most cases. On the surface, it looks pretty legit.

Why is trackback spam a problem? Well, aside from the obvious negative experience for your readers, it forces your blog to link to a splog. And because linking out to bad neighborhoods can result in search engine penalties, you could be hurting your blog without even doing anything — or even knowing that you’re doing it.

How do you stop it? You can’t — at least not completely. What you can do, though, is keep a very close eye on your comments. Review every comment that comes in and actually look at all trackbacks. Most of my trackback spam these days comes from wpbloggers.com & anything ending in .info or .cn lately. I’m not seeing as much from blogspot.com blogs lately.

And take a look at your old trackbacks. You may be surprised at what you’ve missed.

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Comments

  • Andy
    Andy

    October 30, 2007 at
    5:29 pm

    Thanks - I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but your post actually reminded me to get off my butt and do it.

    So far, I’ve found 11 trackback spams that I’d missed over the past few months.


     
  • Rob Malon - Automating Websites
    Rob Malon - Automating Websites

    August 11, 2008 at
    11:09 am

    I was reading through your site and found this post about trackback spam. I just put up a howto on my site about how to prevent spammy trackbacks, comments, and pingbacks: http://robmalon.com/howto-eliminate-wordpress-trackback-comment-and-pingback-spam/

    It is for the most part fully stoppable now :)


     

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