Trackback Spam

A Rising Trend – Trackback or Pingback Spam

What is Trackback Spam? Trackback spam is a way for spammers to garner backlinks from your posts to their website. I categorise trackback spam into several groups. Firstly, false trackback spam. Then we find the obscured related article link. Finally mass trackback spam.

False Trackback Spam

Image from Rice University – Computer Security Lab

This is the most insidious, and unethical of the three groups. False trackback spam is when a spammer creates a list of related article links, publishes the post, so a ping is sent to your blog resulting in a trackback (or pingback) that the spammer hopes will get published, either automatically if moderation is not in place, or by a blogger thinking, “how nice of this person to link to my post”.

After the ping has been sent, the spammer then REMOVES the links to your article… This is a trackback spam method I see more often lately.

Obscured Links