The Fix: Why are these bad blogs linking to me?

Written on March 16, 2008 at 3:51 p.m.

Today I posted an article in an unpublished blog and got a trackback spam within 60 seconds. What is a Trackback or Pingback spam? It is a notification that another blogger has linked to one of your articles.

The correct usage of a Trackback is to notify the original poster that you are following-up or expanding on their idea or have found the article they wrote interesting. Trackbacks are a good thing unless they are used by unscrupulous folks looking to automatically steal bits of your content to quickly fill up blogs with highly targeted content.

This isn’t new, but I get this question a lot. My clients are people who have a specific area of knowledge that they share on their blog and WordPress makes it easy for them, even if they don’t have any technical knowledge. They are not necessarily up to date on the hundred and one ways people use the Internet to dump their ‘natural’ viagra, shady mortgages and crazy rates credit cards on us.

You can also read Splog Reporter.

What it looks like

Why do they do it?

Try to make money the lazy way. These are so many of these splogs using the same software that I figure someone is selling the code with a how-to-get-right-in-24-hours type method.

How do they do it?

As an example I picked the quickest spammer: x7g.net. This server runs multiple Wordpress blogs on a variety of topics that automatically copies fetches parts of your content and refers back to you. Their robot can fetch hundreds of posts a day, maybe more. Unfortunately, their system never attributes the content to the right owner. It does put a link to your article at the end.

When visitors click on the Adsense Ads x7g.net makes money until Adsense blocks them… But since Google’s Adsense policy is to pay revenue share that occured before the ban, it encourages Sploggers to do it again.

Some bloggers may see it as a quick source of incoming links but why publish links that come from spammers. Splogs are routinely banned from Google. This renders the links useless or harmful and may hurt your Google PageRank in the end. Here is an interesting article about Reciprocal Altruism and the use of Trackback or Pingback.

What can you do about it?

Simply refuse them and after one or two refusals you will not get spam from them anymore. The latest version of Akismet treats those comments as well so it will help you keep your blog tidy and relevant to your readers.

BTW those types of comments can fill up a database quickly. If your blog is detected as accepting comments or trackbacks without moderation spammers can quickly fill up your database and break your WordPress Installation.