Trackback spammers beat Typepad nofollow
So I checked out the archives on Seth Godin’s blog and found that trackback spammers have found a way to start filling his blog with pharmaceutical and gambling links from trackbacks - without getting the links hit by Typepad’s automated use of “nofollow” in trackbacks.
What I find particularly ironic is that this blog, and others I read, have pinged Seth’s blog and not shown up as trackbacks - and yet the trackback spammers have found a way to get high-class referrals from him.
Trackback spamming has become a serious growing problem for bloggers - if you’re unfortunate enough to use SixApart’s MovableType, then until this week, you either had trackbacks on or off with no moderation in between - unless you were able to employ anti-spam tools provided for by third parties.
If you left trackbacks on then you could normally be forced to spend long periods of time clearing out the pills, porn, and casino trackbacks from your published pages.
However, turn trackback off and you kill the very avenues of conversation that make blogs a useful community experience.
Trackbacks had to be turned off across the paid-licence Platinax blogs precisely because MovableType provided no default tools for even basic moderation.
Ironically, the free blogging software Wordpress already has advanced protections against trackback spamming built-in, including ignoringg pings from open-proxies - insecure computers and networks used by trackback and comment spammers, to ping spam annonymously over the internet.
It is lapses in responsiblity like these that make MovableType a default target for automated blog spamming software.
If trackback spammers want to automatically hit dead blogs, then that impacts nobody directly - so nobody directly cares.
But indiscriminate automated spamming of active blogs is an act of aggression - if you do that, trackback spammers should be wasting their own time, and wasting site admin’s time, and all to little avail. Indiscriminate trackback spamming should be a worthless act, performed by the marketing incompetent and intellectually crippled.
However, as Seth’s blog indicates, if trackback spamming can not simply overcome basic automatic safeguards from SixApart, and also ensure they remain published on active blogs, then we may yet see the already serious problem of trackback spamming enter new levels of aggression.
ADDENDUM: Looks like a number of bloggers on Typepad have already been hit - Google has indexed a number already: Trackbacked spam targets.
It looks as if this is only the beginning of a process in action - but if Sixapart are unable to offer trackback moderation on Typepad, or delay too long as they did with MovableType, then you can be assured that “nofollow” will be abosultely no substitute for human editorial judgement - and if trackback spamming is seen to work on Typepad blogs, you can be assured that blog spammers will declare open season on Typepad blogs.
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Visited 45722 times, 19 so far today since July 24th 2007
This is what happens when you use sub standard software that comes with a *free* label :lol:
I have absolutely no sympathy for the users of the freely available blog software. If you desire security then develop the software yourself.
If you can’t develop software, then it’s about time you start to learn huh? The Internet is full of information, you just need to want to learn it.
Nuts to those who are too thick
Comment by Angry Developer — September 6, 2005 @ 6:55 pm
your site looks like crap in IE because of the margins- but looks fine in firefox. You might want to look into that.
Comment by quadszilla — September 6, 2005 @ 8:17 pm
Thanks for the headsup quadszilla - I’ve added a fudge to help the margins. :)
As for using free blog software - certainly there is an abrogation of responsibility for security issues in using such services - but I should hope that such services are held to some measure of accountability for providing that security.
“nofollow” has been an ugly presence on the internet - the sooner people apply editorial responsibility for what they publish, instead of presuming an automated method of devaluing links, the better, in my opinion.
Comment by Brian Turner — September 7, 2005 @ 9:06 pm
What does the webmaster community think, just because the nofollow tag stops comment spam, the spammers will just stop and give up? I felt the nofollow tag was a mistake from the start, and posted my article about it when it happened. As for trackback spam, the same applies here too. Any thing developers can come up with, spammers will simply find a work around or something new. Search engines simply love it when the webmaster community takes it on their own to fight spam, because SE’s are so ineffective at it themselves. Unfortunetly, any meaningful change will have to come from the SE’s not on our end. And even there, at the top, whatever SE’s can do, there will always be new tricks discovered. Today it’s trackback spam, the next big thing could even be worse :)
Comment by Bud Wiser — September 29, 2005 @ 6:03 pm
Is it true that its now useless to use nofollow on our blogs? I’m hearing conflicting stories
Comment by Jim — October 23, 2005 @ 4:21 pm
Personally, I killed nofollow on my WP. Follow or no follow, the spammer will come. The only real defense is vigilant monitoring because it doesn’t matter what defenses you have, the spammer will find a way to overcome it. Thank God, WP has Akismet.
Comment by Pinyo — December 6, 2005 @ 2:45 am
[...] A while back I had to contact Seth to warn that trackback spammers had filled his blog with spam. Perhaps he finds moderating his comments against spam too difficult? [...]
Pingback by Brian’s Blog » Seth, truth, and marketing — January 1, 2006 @ 6:49 pm
[...] Most probably - but it hasn’t stop them trying to find ways to overcome nofollow. [...]
Pingback by Brian’s Blog » No follow: one year on — January 5, 2006 @ 1:54 pm
How to fight blog spam…
Blog spam is a major problem.
There’s comment spam, trackback spam, and “splogs” - blogs created from scraping other blogs.
And all are usually automated processes carried out by scripts.
Howeve……
Trackback by Security Watch — October 23, 2006 @ 9:36 pm
Hi,
I know I’m late to the party, but this was a great writeup on the uselessness of nofollow! Wordpress forces me to use it, so I was doing some research on how to beat it and came across your blog. I’m going to install a dofollow plugin that bypasses nofollow in comments.
Comment by Jaimie — April 7, 2009 @ 7:02 am
Hi,
I have a typepad account. Is there a way i can make it a do follow coz typepad is kinda really newstuff for me.
Please i need help, coz most of my sites are do follow. I’ve followed this movement since it’s inception.
Regards,
Jeff
Comment by jeff — April 8, 2009 @ 8:47 am