How do you Fight Trackback Spam?

How do you Fight Trackback Spam A few months ago, I enabled the DoFollow plugin on this blog. I was hoping DoFollow would help garner more and better conversation. Since joining the DoFollow, I Follow, No Nofollow movement, this blog has seen an increase in not only comments but in spam as well – in particular, trackback spam. The Do Follow plugin did increase conversation to an extent but it also significantly increased trackback spam. I am now spending much more of my time deleting trackback spams.

I recently disabled the DoFollow plugin and will continue to monitor both comments and trackback spams. Depending on how the next few weeks or months go, I will make a final decision then on whether to run DoFollow once again. In the meantime, I am almost ready to turn off trackbacks entirely.

How do you deal with trackback spam (or do you just leave them)? How many of you have disabled trackbacks completely from your blog?

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Update: The trackback spam started to come in shortly after this post went live. I am not going to delete them for now. Let’s see how many builds up.

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Update #2: I have finally deleted all the trackback spam from this thread. 100% of the domains (who had trackback links) have either died were redirected to some other site. Either the domain lapsed or someone took over the domain or the original spammer redirected all those links. Some of the redirected websites are even the same so it looks like the original spammer ran multiple websites scrapping content and automatically posted backlinks to their websites.

FIX: I have tried a few trackback plugins. This caught 50% of the spams but the most effective was that I found was to find the offending domain and/or website and enter them manually into Spam Karma 2’s blacklist. Poof, all future trackback spams will get filtered directly. This works for repeat offenders. For new offenders, you still have to enter them into SK2’s blacklist. I can only hope SK2 will come out with a 1-click blacklist solution in the near future.

It’s sad that legitimate websites have to spend resources (server and otherwise) to fight spam but this is reality these days. Hope the above fix can help others out there too.

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7 thoughts on “How do you Fight Trackback Spam?”

Try using the Wordpress plugin called Simple Trackback Validation – kills the vast majority of it in one stroke :-)No need to disable trackbacks.

http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/

On my Nucleus blog I use another trackback spam plugin which works almost as well.

*Note: URL fixed as per Maurice’s request

Sorry, I totally messed up that link – please edit

Here is the right one

http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/

Thanks Maurice. I appreciate the plugin suggestion. Looks like that just might do the trick as I will have it run alongside Spam Karma 2 AND Akismet when I make a final decision. Back to monitoring.

Thanks again.

Hi Ian,

Thanks for dropping by my place 🙂 and apologies for the goof on the link. Hopefully the plugin will be worth it for you and you’ve found a new subscriber too!

No problem Maurice. I hope others with trackback spam problems can also benefit from your link.

Allowing visitors to comment without restricting their URL is an intelligent way to increase participation in discussion forum or blog like this one and encourage them to be more active. It is a win win situation when fairly used, but it could be a double edged sword too. Many will abuse the given opportunity when commenting just to get a clear link to their sites. I’d personally allow the DOFOLLOW feature along with a good dose of moderation.