I’ve had my last pingback spam.
Anyone who has a blog knows that the comment feature is what makes a blog stand out from a plain old Web site. The comment feature is what makes a blog interactive, it’s what gives readers a chance to share their point of view or additional information about a topic. It gives them a chance to ask questions and get answers.
The comment feature works with the pingback feature. Pingbacks (which are often referred to as trackbacks) are machine-generated “comments” that are added to a post when another blogger writes a post that links to it.
Huh?
Okay, think of it this way. You’re blogger A writing post 1. Blogger B writes post 2 that includes a link to post 1. A comment appears on post 1 that links back to post 2. This is all done automatically in WordPress (my blogging platform of choice) if — and this is a big if — you left the Allow Pings option turned on for post 1. You can find the setting for this in the Discussion area of the Write Post administration panel.
Unfortunately, the pingback feature also makes it possible for sploggers to get free links to their sites. A splogger builds content on a blog by stealing it from RSS feeds. Their goal is usually to get hits on their Web sites, which are full of Google AdSense ads, but they sometimes are part of a “link farm” that boosts search engine ranking.
The problem lately is that my sites have been attracting more pingback spam from splogging sites than real pings from legitimate sites and bloggers. These must be manually deleted, since my spam prevention software doesn’t seem able to catch them all. And frankly, I’m a little sick of spending each morning deleting six to twenty of these comments.
So I’m going to stop writing posts with the pingback feature enabled.
And if you’re having this problem on your blog, I recommend that you do the same.
I can understand your pain, but you are killing one of the features that make blogospheric discussions possible. If everyone used pingbacks more, distributed discussions would be possible and the comments obsolete. Pingbacks also make the links bi-directional, which adds tremendous semantic value. Could you not try to improve your anti-spam tools before giving up ? On my WordPress blogs, a combination of Akismet, Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 Reloaded make an excellent job of keeping 99.9% of the spam out and they don’t require any significant maintainance.
Jean-Marc Liotier’s last blog post..Differences between a bookmarks feed and a link blog
Well, I already use TWO anti-spam tools: Bad Behavior and Spam Karma, Together, they catch an average of 20,000 comment spam attempts per week. This is not an exaggeration; check the footer my An Eclectic Mind site at http://www.aneclecticmind.com/. (MariasGuides.com is only 2 weeks old, so it hasn’t been attacked much yet.) I think that’s pretty darn good. Maybe you’re not seeing this kind of spam because you’re not under attack to the extent that I am on that site?
The percentage of legitimate pingbacks to spam pingbacks is very low. I’d say I get one or two legitimate pingbacks a month, compared to 10 to 20 spam pingbacks a day. I start each morning manually reviewing and deleting this spam. In some cases, the pingback spam appears on the post within 5 minutes of the post’s publication! I don’t want to have to monitor my blog all day long.
The way I see it, the best way to stop pingback spam is to make it impossible for pingbacks to be used as a spamming tool. I’ve decided to do my part.
A dialog can still exist! As you may have noticed, I’m using a plugin that displays the last post (with a link) for commenters. This should encourage visitors to comment on the posts they read — which is true participation — and be rewarded with a link back to their site.
I do appreciate your feedback, though. Please understand that I’ve been dealing with this for several months now and really am at the end of my rope. Maybe you can do better than I have at convincing Dr. Dave (of Spam Karma) to give us customization tools that help recognize pingback spam based on common phrases used within them? I tried contacting him more than a month ago about this and got nowhere. (And I’m one of his bigger supporters, having made several donations to his cause over the past two years.)
I actually read this article in your feed, and then came to comment in much the same terms as Jean-Marc has.
Trackbacks are one of the foundations of this blogging business and it does seem a shame to have to shut them off. I hope you can find other ways of resolving the problem.
Andy Piper’s last blog post..A trip to Bangkok
Here’s the challenge, then: Go to http://www.aneclecticmind.com/ and find five non-spam pingbacks on the site received within the past 6 months. I see all the comments/pingbacks that are posted and can only remember seeing maybe two of them in the past year.
I guess if I saw more non-spam pingbacks, I’d be more likely to keep the feature enabled. But I don’t. And weeding through all the pingback garbage simply isn’t worth the effort if the only reward is two or three pingbacks a year.
But I’ll try an experiment. I’ll keep pingbacks turned on on THIS site and turn them off on An Eclectic Mind. Since this site is newer, I think it’s less likely to be spammed. We’ll see.
Spam is destroying the internet. Demand stronger laws with stiffer penalties, deploy captcha and add a link to Spam Poison to dilute e-mail harvesting efforts. Yesterday I had to abandon my Yahoo account as it is over run with spam.