May 20 2009
How to Stop Trackback Spam on WordPress
Odtaa asks:
I’m getting some weird trackbacks on my websites. They link to one of my articles and then lots of other links.
The sites are usually WordPress. They have links to many articles, including mine, but nothing else.
I assume some way of boosting one of the links on the site in a way of fooling Google.
Should I delete them?
Yes you should delete those, as they are probably trackback spam.
One of the problems with most blogging platforms is that people can easily abuse the trackback feature. On WordPress, for instance, you have a box right below the text editor titled “Send Trackbacks.” If users put the URL of your post there and publish or update their posts, your blog will get a trackback notification and probably put a link on your comments section to that blog.
If the user puts hundreds of post URLs on that field, therefore, he would be generating hundreds of backlinks to his website. Most would be nofollowed, some perhaps not, but still he would gain traffic and some visibility with search engines.
Sometimes the automatic trackback feature will not work, and then the user will need to actually include the links on the post body. That is the kind you are seeing, probably. After a while the can delete those posts, and the trackbacks remain where they are.
Deleting those spam trackbacks manually is an option, but it might start taking a lot of time. If you want to solve the problem for good, there are two options.
One is to keep the trackbacks but use a filtering system. My recommendation for this would be the Simple Trackback Validation plugin.
A second alternative, which is more drastic, is to completely remove trackbacks froom your single post pages. I explain how to do that on the post Separate Trackbacks from Comments on Your WordPress Blog.
