Comments on: Trackback spam explained

By: Jeffrey

Jeffrey — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:48:44 +0000

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.

By: fsbo

fsbo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:13:13 +0000

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.

By: Robert Kennedy

Robert Kennedy — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:19:20 +0000

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.

By: Annie Maloney

Annie Maloney — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:34:36 +0000

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.

By: circuits

circuits — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:21:53 +0000

How r u handling this? Iâ€™m getting so much that I considered disabling trackbacks altogether. My preferred solution to automagically validate each trackback requires a bit of work.

By: A Daily Rant » Something Smells Phishy

A Daily Rant » Something Smells Phishy — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 13:53:28 +0000

[...] Here are a couple articles to see about this:http://www.tomrafteryit.net/trackback-spam-explained/ And http://www.tomrafteryit.net/blocking-trackback-spam-using-htaccess/ [...]

By: Blocking trackback spam using .htaccess » at Tom Raftery’s I.T. views

Blocking trackback spam using .htaccess » at Tom Raftery’s I.T. views — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:52:04 +0000

[...] This morning I received a trackback spam. It pointed at a rubbish domain – ohuudfghj.com, and came from ip address 172.164.210.50 using User Agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90). [...]

By: zisha

zisha — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 08:52:35 +0000

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.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 17:25:31 +0000

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.

By: Randy Charles Morin

Randy Charles Morin — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:49:18 +0000

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.