gavinshearer.com

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September 21, 2005

Trackback Spammers

Effective immediately, I have disabled TrackBack on gavinshearer.com.

Put simply, the volume of TrackBack spam has grown exponentially over the last week or so. Despite automated countermeasures and the liberal banning of IP addresses, these parasites have continued to spray ads for casinos, porn - you name it - throughout the blog, using TrackBack as their delivery mechanism.

I like the idea of TrackBack a lot. Intended as a way of facilitating conversations between bloggers, it lets authors notify one another when a work is cited in a new post. TrackBack's promise is to connect more people, and provide greater context for readers by letting them follow TrackBack'd entries.

Sadly, the mechanism has been hijacked by those who are desperate to get their sites listed high in the search engines.

One way that engines (like Google) measure link "quality" (where higher quality = a higher position in the search results) is through the number of sites that point to you. Spammers use robots to post bogus TrackBack links all over the Web, thus causing their Google index to rise.

So I've turned off TrackBack.

I've wrestled with this decision for a few days now, but the problem is both straightforward and, ultimately, intractable. The anti-spam technology we have in e-mail is sophisticated and getting better; TrackBack has no such sophistication. So, owing to the outrageous administrative overhead of cleaning up after these bastards, I'm just throwing the switch.

To my honest readers: I apologize.
Score one for the bad guys, I guess.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at September 21, 2005 7:29 PM. Posted to Geek.

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