The most effective blog spam (cont’d)
Making spammer manually enter text into your blog comment system is indeed very hard to defend, but that also means a victory of bloggers. Quoting from Wordpress Trackback Validator Plugin:
The existence of the Validator (and other tools now using the same technique) has forced spammers to change their tactics.
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So, what’s happened here? In order to successfully submit a spam TrackBack, a spammer has to:
- Set up a real blog (or blog-like website).
- Create a stable URL (like a blog post).
- Link from this post to your site.
- Send you a TrackBack from the stable blog post URL.
We knew this would happen (assuming the writer means TrackBack instead of Pingback) and consider this a victory: The spammer is now giving you PageRank, but more importantly, his website looks just like a blog. It is, effectively, a real blog. Who’s to say he’s a spammer and not just another blogger out there (the contents of whose blog you’re not particularly impressed by)?
Today I received similar trackback spam that doesn’t pass through, but almost look like a legitimate comment; the URL in comment is also a valid site, and at that first glance I almost think it is dedicated to astronomy. Only after looking at the content can I determine the site is full of meaningless junk.