pf » Over 90% of trackbacks were spam

March 02, 2006

Over 90% of trackbacks were spam

I haven't been monitoring my trackbacks for a while, and when I checked them this morning I found a ton of spam. After I was finished deleting around 700 trackbacks (not by hand, I ran queries with spam words).

I found that over 90% of all the trackbacks that I've had on my blog are spam. That figure was a little higher than I expected. Keep in mind that I wasn't doing much to filter them out. I generally like the idea of trackbacks, so I'm not going to disable them. Would you stop using email just because you get a lot of spam? No you get a better filter.

So that's just what I did, and thankfully Ray Camden just posted a list of trackback spam words that I was able to easily use in my own blog software. Thanks Ray!.

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Trackback Address: 545/FB3838920B9F969EF8DD0329273C1710

Comments

On 03/02/2006 at 4:15:31 AM MST Raymond Camden wrote:

Just an fyi, but the list was updated in the last 60 minutes. I've been getting some new porn spam lately.

On 03/02/2006 at 4:25:01 AM MST Pete Freitag wrote:

Ok, thanks Ray!

On 03/02/2006 at 6:34:12 AM MST Mike Rankin wrote:

You know, trackbacks just don't seem to be worth the trouble.

On 03/02/2006 at 6:40:38 AM MST Raymond Camden wrote:

Heh, well, they are worth it when they aren't spam. :) Btw Pete, the porn attack continues. I'd recommend checking my list - again - and keep it up the next few days. Not sure why porn is the big thing now. It -was- drugs, but I seem to have stopped most of them.

On 03/02/2006 at 7:24:19 AM MST JD wrote:

Well, as you know - The Internet is for Porn!

*check google videos

On 03/02/2006 at 11:47:06 AM MST john Wilker wrote:

I just had to disable trackbacks on my blog. I worked up a non image captcha type deal for comments but trackbacks just weren't important enough at the time.

On 03/06/2006 at 7:35:09 AM MST Johnny wrote:

What is trackbacks? All I know about trackbacks is that nowaday most of the blogs have the Trackback url at the bottom of every entry. What does it do? What is the benefit of it?

On 03/06/2006 at 7:48:09 AM MST Pete Freitag wrote:

Trackbacks are an automatic way for blog software to tell other another blog that they have linked to this article.

So if you want to write a comment about this article on your blog, you can ping my trackback url, and a link to your blog entry will show up on my blog under trackbacks.

On 03/07/2006 at 3:31:03 AM MST m@t wrote:

Thanks for the explanation of trackbacks. So your blog entries unknowingly provide links to sites that are considered spam or completely unrelated to your blog entry?

On 03/07/2006 at 7:53:33 AM MST Johnny wrote:

Yah, thanks for the explanation. So is this trackbacks only available for you to view? I don't see them so I assume it is just for you to see. If it is just for you to see, why do people bother to spam it? To help their search ranking?