I’m seeing an increasing number of splog trackbacks. If you blog, you will, of course, know all about blogspam: comments that are injected into your blog by “spam bots” and which contain links to spam targets – usually porn, pharm, gambling, etc. There are many ways to counter this stuff, including comment moderation and spam detection systems like Akismet. (I use Akismet and Bad Behavior on this site.)
But splogs are fairly new. The most common manifestation is a fairly generic-looking WordPress or MovableType blog with a set of sidebar links to spam targets. It’s the blog “articles” that are interesting. A spam bot scans various Popular Blogs, finds a recent article, scrapes some of the text, wraps it in some boilerplate text, and constructs an article on the splog. It then generates a trackback ping to the original blog. The idea is that the owner of the Popular Blog will publish the trackback in the comments section, and that later on the spiders from the search engines will find these trackbacks, note that they come from Popular Blogs, and bump the pagerank for the splog to which they point.
And they work! On a couple of occasions recently, I’ve Googled for a subject about which I’d blogged, and I’ve found hits on splogs, quoting my words and referring back to my blog! It’s a bit weird actually… I find myself wondering if splog links are affecting my pagerank!
Simple moderation doesn’t always catch this, because the trackback looks genuine, and we all want our blog entries to be popular and attract links – don’t we? (Of course the paranoid among us, like Alec, are safe: they simply ignore trackbacks.) Fortunately Akismet seems to be on the case; it’s caught several splog trackbacks here recently. In the meantime, I’ve got into the habit of inspecting all trackbacks to my site. You should, too.