I think I have finally taken a bite out of trackback spam. When I instituted trackbacks on these blogs, it worked well. . .for a couple of months. The next time I looked, there were literally thousands of spams that had to be deleted. It seems once these spammers find you, they add you to their automated spammer machines and hit you relentlessly. Filtering by keywords was the first defense, and it worked on 90% of the spam. The problem is, every new spam contains some new spammer product or service. . .acne treatments, cricket blogs, disney vacations. I can't possibly keep up with all of it.

Rather than submit to these parasites or remove trackback functionality, I added functionality that automatically checks every link in the trackback post, goes out to each linked site, reads the site content, and checks for a reference to the post being trackback linked. If there is no reference to the post, the trackback is not legitimate. In those cases, I check the whois and grab the information in put it into my database. At that point, I can parse the email addresses of the domain holders and send them an automated bill for their trackback spam and send out an automated email to whoever I think the spam should be reported to.

I don't expect to ever get results from the measures, but at least now the trackback spam has dropped off from thousands to hundreds to dozens to zero. I deleted over 16,000 spams from Community MX over the last few months.

Cross posted at http://www.communitymx.com/blog