Using Trackbacks
Trackbacks are kind of new to me, I’ve known of their existence and used them for quite some time but never really paid any attention to them. Until recently when I was working on a WordPress blog cleaning comments of spam and preventing further spam. We already had Akismet for WordPress installed, which is a must, but the spam wasn’t being managed properly so I began my investigation. The majority of the spam came through trackbacks. Since the blog also displayed these trackbacks without being moderated the blog became a link farm for spammers. The trackbacks accounted for 70% of the spam.
At first, I was destined to destroy trackbacks – I hated them. Mind you I had to sort through the spam to find the legitimate comments and trackbacks. But as I sifted through trackbacks I thought about what would be considered legitimate trackbacks. Would a legitimate trackback be from anyone blogging on the topic, anyone copying and pasting the post, or only from sites within the blogs network? The blog has guest posts, which the guest author usually links to from their website, and partners that the blog works with. These became the ground rules for trackbacks later in the process, but what about the other options?
I began examining each legitimate site that came through, I immediately marked any of the sites copying and pasting the post(s) as spam. As I examined the content of the urls that sent the trackbacks it became clear that most of the followers of this blog were an older generation. Since the sites didn’t contain any original content I decided to remove those trackbacks. Believe it or not, some of these trackbacks were from the competition and after looking at those trackbacks I couldn’t find a link to the blog anywhere in the site. Surprise!
So far this blog has hosted links to general spam, poor community followers and the competition. This is when I became inspired to create the Back List plugin for WordPress, if I could define sets of urls to auto-approve or delete I could block the competition and approve the sites we really wanted to link to. The blog is now spam free and has built a well defined network of link sharing with it’s guest authors and partners.
Summary
- Use Trackbacks to your advantage
- Approve Trackbacks from sites you support
- Don’t link to just anyone, this could hurt your site’s search engine results
- Don’t leave Akismet unattended
One Response to “Using Trackbacks”
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Cool plugin man. A whitelist for pingbacks is exactly what I was looking for.