This Is How You Should Deal With Trackback Spam

Trackbacks are extremely useful for bloggers and webmasters alike when it’s used properly. When used properly, trackbacks can help facilitate communication between blogs and notify bloggers when and who has written about their content. When it’s used in bad ways, it then becomes trackback spam – on par with that of comment spam.

What Are Trackbacks?

Trackbacks basically are a linkback to someone’s else content who has linked to yours. It is used to let the blogger who receives the trackback that someone else is referencing his post and mentioning his site. Trackbacks usually appear in your comments section of your blog (it depends on what type of blogging platform you use and the theme you are using).

Trackbacks look like this:

To see a live example, check out my post here and scroll to the bottom. Note: I deleted the link in the trackback. A trackback without it’s link deleted links back to the website that links to you.

Trackback Spam?

We’ve all heard about comment spam. It’s one of the things that every single blogger would most probably know about. Comment spams usually contain lots of hyperlinks to websites that have questionable content. Comments that do not contain any sort of hyperlinks but are not related to the topic or the post are also usually looked upon as spam and thus gets moderated by the administrator (This happens at Drett)

As comment spam filters are getting increasingly complex and effective, the spammers are getting more and more desperate to find new ways to spam a site, and thus trackbacks spam is born. A person with a website with questionable content links to your post, a trackback then appears on your post which links back to his website. Thus giving him the backlink he wants and also entirely bypassing comment spam filters. Don’t mix up legitimate trackbacks with spammy tackbacks. The spammy trackbacks are where the post in which the person links to you has entirely no relation to the content in which you are writing about while the legitimate trackbacks are where the the content is related.

So What Should I Do about Trackback Spam?

When receiving a spammy trackback, you can do a few things. The first choice would be to delete the trackback, keeping your comments area clean and spamless. The second choice would be to leave it there, giving the spammer the linkback he wants while lowering your reputation and respect as you link to sites with questionable content. The third option is what I’m recommending for you to do, and that is to delete edit the trackback and delete the link, but leave the trackback there. (Example here). This gives you content in your comments as sometimes even spammy trackbacks are related in very small ways while also lightening up your comments area, but at the same time taking away the linkback to the spammy site. Thus saving you reputation and reputation from going down the drain.

Every blogger and webmaster loves content and activity within the comments of a post, but hate giving out links to spammers in the comments area. The third method I suggested is the best way to deal with trackback spam. It gives you all the advantages of a legitimate trackback while neutralizing it’s disadvantages.

Word of advice, only use the 3rd method which I highlighted above when the trackback is not complete spam. As even the method above won’t help you if the trackback is complete spam. Also, you can use the method which I shared to edit even legitimate trackbacks to stop your pagerank from leaking – yes, it might seem cruel but people do do this .

So from now on, do yourself a favour and instead of totally deleting the trackback, edit the track and remove it’s hyperlink. What do you guys think about trackback spam and the method of which I shared on how to deal with it?

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