Trackback Spam, Praising Dvorak, Office Revenge And Other Byways On The Route To Where You’re Going

By | June 8, 2005

One of the scary, but compelling, bits of having a blog is seeing how people found you. TypePad offer referring addresses which make this very easy, but all it does is make you wonder whether most of the people visiting you are on their way to somewhere else. (It also reveals how well trackback spam works.) Here’s a sampling of the past few hours:

That said, most of the searches seem to be pretty good matches. Only now I dread to think what kind of search results this posting is going to end up in.

3 thoughts on “Trackback Spam, Praising Dvorak, Office Revenge And Other Byways On The Route To Where You’re Going

  1. Akshay

    I’m kinda confused as to what a trackback is/does and how it linked bizzare searches to your blog …

    Reply
  2. Jeremy

    Akshay, as I understand it, what happens is this:
    * spammer links to a page on my blog
    * this triggers TypePad to create a TrackBack
    * TypePad creates a TrackBack entry on my blog, which includes a title and excerpt to the site that is linking to my blog posting
    * That title can include a link, or several, which the spammer would use to include links to the sites he’s trying to promote
    * The excerpt would include some keywords (“Buy accutane,cheap albuterol” etc)
    * These keywords would then start being included on search engines
    * Users of search engines looking for these products would see my blog pages appear and visit them
    * A side benefit would be folk visiting those pages anyway, and seeing the ‘ads’.

    Reply

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