More about Trackback abuses
In a post I made a few days ago, I referred to a trackback that seemed halfway relevant, but set off alarm bells in my head because of the url: viral-memes.info. I followed the trackback and found a halfway related topic on a very weird website, but no link back to my blog that would have indicated the trackback occurred because of a mention of content.
Not only was there no direct link, there was no mention whatsoever. There was a link to a separate blog. I don’t know if it was malicious or not, but the act of pinging a trackback url manually after searching for related posts on “media mammon” takes some effort. If the guy wrote me and told me that it was a mistake, I would understand, but think about the trackback spamming implications. If you are a comment spammer, why not find a popular link topic from technorati, quote a bunch of bloggers, then hit everyone’s trackback with your text, hidden in a black background (or even out in the open) just to get people clicking to your site. You’d probably fool most people doing cursory summary checks in their trackback logs.
Still, i’m not sure that spammers don’t really worry about blacklist users or careful watchers of their trackback logs… it seems more the opposite, that those of us who prune comments are so few that it’s still a worthwhile business model to increase pagerank of a spammer’s site.
In my view, trackbacks are useful because they help to make blogger’s contributions to knowledge and opinion cumulative. Just using them to direct traffic towards your single, isolated blog without a related link out doesn’t make any sense to me.