How spammers can lead you to links

Okay, here’s a quickie - just received an email in my inbox showing comment spam.

It’s from an automated blog trackback - you know, those Wordpress installs that just republish feeds and trackback from it.

It’s easy just to throw it away - but having just looked at a couple of blogs I run, decided to run a backlink search on Yahoo! for blogs that are dumb enough to publish these trackbacks in order to get some additional link sources.

Anyway, a linkdomain check on Yahoo! shows about 500 sources - no doubt some duplicates in there, but that doesn’t matter.

A coder might strip the list automatically, but I’m going to compile a list manually, then save this as a file of sites to trackback.

No, I’m not going to trackback spam these sites - instead, I’m going to ensure I write posts which focus on topics around these target sites, to synergise with on-topic posts from on-topic blogs.

The problem being, it’s not easy to guarantee trackbacks from blogs - a lot have them disabled by default (such as here) because of spam issues.

So the ability to identify blogs which are less discerning about publishing trackbacks, have traffic, and an internet presence (PR, authority, domain age etc) means being able to get links from additional sources to boost my own blog sites.

Overall, it’s leveraging white hat methods, using a grey hat strategy, devised from black hat spam.

And that’s useful. :)

ADDED: Nngh! Don’t forget to ensure you can spot “external nofollow” easily - just had to update my Firefox CSS stylesheet as it only highlighted “nofollow”. Will have to go back through my list!