I posted about Trackback Spam previously but it was brought to my attention that I didn’t explain it properly, so I am now going to attempt to rectify that.
If you are using a blogging application, like Wordpress, there is a facility called Trackback, whereby, when you are making a post in your blog, and you refer to a post someone else made in their blog, you can add in the trackback uri of their post (normally displayed at the end of their post) to your blogging software, and it will send a notification (called a trackback) to them.
When their blogging software receives this notification (Trackback), it displays the relevant part of the post in the comments section of the site.
Spammers are recently starting to post faked trackbacks directly to people’s blogging software, pretending someone has posted about one of your posts, hoping your blogging software will automatically display their spam on your site (thinking it is a legitimate comment).
The reason they do this is to get links from external sites to their sites, thereby pushing up their all-important Google Page Rank.
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How r u handling this? I’m getting so much that I considered disabling trackbacks altogether. My preferred solution to automagically validate each trackback requires a bit of work.
Randy,
I have taken a few measures to combat this – one is I look through my log analyser and edit my .htaccess file accordingly to keep these guys out.
Another method is I have installed Spam Karma and this seems to help too.
I have quite a few posts on this site about the various measures I have taken (use the search or the Category links to find these), including a link to a copy of my current .htaccess file (http://www.tomrafteryit.net/views/htaccess.txt).
Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Tom.
Hate to said this but Google and their Page-rank are the mother of all comment and referral spamers. Hopefully one day Google will improve their Page-rank to look into this artificial linking stuff.
How r u handling this? I’m getting so much that I considered disabling trackbacks altogether. My preferred solution to automagically validate each trackback requires a bit of work.
I have always wondered how those trackbacks would get into the comments section when they are blatant spam, and more so why the author would allow it. I was unaware of how they were doing it but its good to know now.
Leave it to spammers to ruin a good thing. Thanks for the informative post. I didn’t realize that was what the trackback Url did. Now that I know what a trackback is I like the idea of including them in my blog posts because the author of the post will be notified, and be able to read what I have written about their post, and then comment on it if they like. Very cool, to bad about the spam angle though.
I agree with you, i got 14 track backs in a singly day and when i checked, to my surprise; there was not my post.
Thanks for the explanation, I thought it was weird that I was getting trackbacks less than 30 seconds after a post.
Ive also been receiving a lot of spam that contains absolutely nothing except a bunch of letters like “fjkhdfjh”, but the link obviously goes nowhere. Any ideas what that could be? I’ve been getting 10+ a day.