Trackback Spam

Since the introduction of the six digit security code for posting comments, there has been very little comment spam.

I still get quite a bit of trackback spams, usually a couple a day, where people ping my site and it creates a trackback to them. I delete those ones and blacklist the URLs the trackbacks go back to, which stops most future spams.

In the last few days I have been getting a lot of trackback spams, all saying something like “this is related article” but with the URLs being Google, Yahoo and MSN. Definitely work of professional spammers as uses a different IP address every few minutes.

Now I can’t work out why the spammers are doing this – what benefit they get? Sure when it is a trackback to one of their own sites it helps their pagerank etc. But this just creates links to search engines.

If I blacklist these URLs to stop the spam, then no-one will be able to use Google, Yahoo or MSN addresses to comment, so I’d rather not.

How-ever does anyone know if my blog is harmed in anyway by these trackback spams to search engines? They crowd out legitimate trackbacks but apart from that seem harmless.

Four spam examples are trackbacked off this article as an example.