I love Akismet, Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behavior. In fact, I probably wouldn’t allow comments at all if I didn’t have those plugins installed. Spam’s become a thing of the past, and I’ve been able to keep the discussion fairly open as of late.

Trackback spam is getting on my nerves, though. I’ve had several links made to my site from what looks to be some sort of WordPress feed aggregation tool… The sites copy all of the content from particular posts and/or a small excerpt from the post and then link back to my site. Seems harmless, right? It would be if the sites in question were legitimate. The problem is: they’re nothing but Splogs (Spam Blogs).

If a site trackbacks/pings a post on my site, I check it out. I monitor incoming links through MeasureMap, Google Analytics, and by watching Technorati. If you’re not reviewing who’s linking to your site, I recommend you make it a habit.

There are WordPress plugins that deal with trackback spam, but from what I’ve seen they mainly just check to see whether or not a link to your site is present on the offending page… If it is, the link makes it through; if not, the link gets denied.

Spammers are attempting to use trackbacks as a means to 1) drive traffic to their sites; and 2) improve their PageRank by having links appear on established sites with decent PageRank scores. That’s why it’s imperative that you delete the inbound links as quickly as possible to make sure they don’t benefit from a link on your site.