There’s a post over at Performancing talking about comments and trackbacks which made me go doh! when I read it. I never imagined people who write about professional blogging would be so poorly informed when it comes to comment and trackback spam. While some points the author states do make sense the rest would make any spammer worth his AdSense checks laugh. Here goes:
I may yet have to deal with it [comment spam] more strongly in the future by blocking a list of IP addresses, if necessary.
Raj - don’t you know that comment spam is done using scripts as a rule, not manually, and those scripts use proxies to post comments to thousands of blogs without getting tracked or banned based on IP? Surprise surprise…
Next one:
Since spambloggers don’t generally write content, you will not have spambacks
- doh! I’ll have you know that there are at least several trackback ping tools that can send trackback pings to targeted blogs even if the spammer doesn’t have a blog at all. The comments are funny too:
Comment spam and trackback spam are the same thing. I am pretty sure that someone out there is working on an XLM-RPC spam bot right now. It shouldn’t be too difficult.
- no Marcus, they are not the same thing. They use different mechanisms - but you’re right, creating a spam bot for both is a breeze.
What else do we have here:
Enabling trackback comments encourages people to write posts that reference you, more so than if you only allow regular, manually-submitted comments. This arguably adds a bit more weight and credibility to the trackback comment, and thus might encourage other readers to visit the linking site.
It’s true that trackback pings help get links from other people, and it’s tru that seeing a bit of a post on the otehr blog referring to the topic of the current post is likely to encourage people to visit the blog that sent the TB ping - but the downside is that there’s little control to what people will see as the text accompanying the trackback ping link. You never know what ends up displaying on the receiving end - it might be the text adjacent to the link to the targeted blog in the best case - or it might be the beginning of the post - or it might just be some random meaningless bit like “posted on… by… del.icio.us this…” and so on.
And to complete this chef-d’oeuvre of a post, there goes another bit of sheer disinformation in the end of it:
…some blog platforms just do not support them [trackback pings]. This includes Blogger.com…
Raj - where have you been for the last few months? It’s been a while since Blogger has enabled trackback pings - only they call them differently - backlinks.
The comments, like I said, are no better:
With trackbacks turned on you would be linking out to spammers. Linking to bad pills, pr0n and “enhancements” neighbourhoods.
Chris - AFAIK, and it concerns most if not all existing platforms, trackback pings can be moderated just like normal comments - so you won’t be linking to shite if you don’t like it.
And finally:
But I didn’t realize comment spam was generated by trackbacks.
- Raj, it’s not generated by trackbacks. Comment spam is generated by comment spam scripts and trackback spam is generated by trackback spam scripts - they are different although might be looking similar at the first glance. I will leave out the next passage about Blogspot blogs as it’s not exactly related - but I am seriously surprized. OK you might kick my arse and say I’m a blackhat spammer so that’s why I know all the stuff decent people are not suposed to know - but dang people you’re making a living with blogs! - You should know things like trackback and if you know the mainstream part of it you are bound to know the spam part as well…
Rand mentioned on his blog that I should probably do a guest article on Performancing - methinks it’s a TB spam and other blog-related spam FAQ I should be doing then 
