101 Articles Trackback Spam
TRACKBACK SPAM (SPRINGS OR SPAM PINGS)
Trackbacks are a type of linkbacks which request notification when somebody links to one of their blog post or news post. Trackback helps in keeping the track of who links to us and who is referring their articles as part of the document. Top weblog programs like Wordpress, movable type and CMS platforms like Drula, TYPO use automated trackbacks.
For trackback to work, either blogs or CMS platforms communicating should have trackbacks enabled. Trackbacks are great ways to know who links to you. Search engine spammers used the power of trackbacks to gain backlinks to their blogs by pinging the targeted blogs and leaving a trackback in their blog. A trackback can become a backlink to a webpage when it is linked from the targeted blog.
Trackbacks appear just above or below the comments and they are easy to achieve. Some individuals and companies abuse trackbacks to gain backlinks for their blog / website.
A spammer will ping a blog for fresh contents and if they identify fresh content they will place a link in the comment section of the new blog post. Trackback spam to gain backlinks has been a plague in blog industry. Blog and CMS software platforms are using various methods to combat trackback spam from splogs (Spam Blogs). Spammers use trackbacks to submit their spam links to other valid blogs.
Ping-o-matic a service by Matt mullenweg has estimated that more than all pings to a blog are from spam blogs trying to insert their links. Spammers ping to see refreshed content so that they can leave a trackback. Search engines are fighting hard to tackle these types of links and there are plugins available for Wordpress publishers to stop trackbacks for their blog.
Also SEO experts and SEO spammers are aware that a trackback can help with internal linking for a website though trackback links are reciprocal links. There are even softwares that ping blogs and see which blogs allow trackbacks and help a user submit to those blogs.
In Wordpress, trackbacks can be pre-moderated, which helps it from not going live if it is SPAM.
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Pingbacks
Trackback spam
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A record of Trackback spam from the period of March 1, 2007 to April 29, 2008 is shown in the above image. The graph states that there has been huge variations in the trackback spams. It was at its peak during November 11, 2007.
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |