Want to optimize? Don’t use Trackback Submitter
For a number of weeks now, we’ve seen a real spike in comment spam submitted to NaturalSearchBlog. We have a nice, heuristic-based module that keeps this out, and we moderate comments. I normally review the filtered comments, and they’re usually just tons of crappy spamlinks for sex, drugs, and gambling. Today I found a number of bona-fide comments that got aggressively filtered out with the deluge of spam, so I resurrected those and approved them. If you’ve commented here recently, we apologize for the delay in approving the comments — but they just got sucked in with the bulk of crap.
One of the 5,000-plus spam comments was from a vile company called “Trackback Submitter”. I knew what this was, of course, but I went to their site anyway in order to see what they say about themselves, and found unsurprisingly that they LIE, LIE, and LIE! If you’re a webmaster wanting to build traffic, avoid this software or you could damage yourself. Read on and I’ll explain…
A real track-back link can make it so that if you write a blog posting about someone else’s blog, your software can automatically submit a snippet of your article to the the other person’s blog with a link back to you. Now, I believe this application of trackback is relatively harmless, and can provide some value to the internet through linking up articles about related themes. This feature can be useful and can enhance user-experience of blogs and news articles. The blog owner can also decide if they want to have the trackback appear on their site as well, if they’ve moderated comments and review them before they publish.
But, Trackback Submitter takes it further and allows the unscrupulous to deploy comments out to as many unprotected blogs and forums as the software is able to find, and the links have nothing to do with the articles, threads or blogs they would appear upon.
Their promotional text on their homepage is highly deceptive and can lead people down the wrong road.
Here’s the first sentence on their homepage at the moment:
Trackback Submitter was covered on world’s leading SEO website - Search Engine Journal - as the most powerful backlinks submitter in the world! Read full article at Search Engine Journal by clicking here.
Search Engine Journal never called them powerful, and the article they linked-to is actually recommending against using Trackback Submitter. Are these guys idiots or something?!? Perhaps they’re foreigners who thought the Search Engine Journal article was positive? (Actually, they ARE foreigners, if the domain registration info I’ve posted below is any indication.)
Trackback Submitter crawls blogs and forums, seeking to automatically submit the operator’s “comments” all through them, linking back to their site. If lots of links point back to one’s site, one can build PageRank and increase one’s rankings in the search engines, right?
Wrong!
The search engines perceived this manipulative problem, and they created a protocol specifically to help fight this practice: the NOFOLLOW attribute. Adding, REL=”NOFOLLOW” into a hyperlink tag alerts the search engine that you don’t recommend the link, and the search engines will not follow the link nor use it in computing the destination site’s rankings.
The Trackback Submitter site would lead the uninformed to believe that use of their software will result in greater rankings through more backlinks. But many people have enabled their blogs/forums to automatically NOFOLLOW any links from comments, and the search engines are very effective at identifying the spam in comments not protected by NOFOLLOW. So, this software doesn’t necessarily help you build search engine traffic. How about this for proof: the submit-trackbackdotcom website has ZERO PAGERANK! If their software was so great, why don’t they show a healthy PR? I’ll tell you why: they’ve been red-flagged as spammers, and have been penalized by Google, and others as a result.
So, use of this software could actually get you penalized by the search engines.
Here’s another lie of theirs: “The only trackback submitter on the Internet which bypasses comments anti-spam plugins used on blogging software.” Huh?!? I hate to break it to them, but their own comment spam was easily halted by the anti-spam module we use here on this blog.
This software deploys information pollution onto the internet, trashing up the blogosphere. They purposefully try to mislead clients into buying their package. They lie in their promotional materials, and they encourage individuals to spew more and more of the vomitous promotions into everyone’s sites without care for the harm that they do.
Using this software can get you penalized by the search engines and reviled by thousands: this is not a good method for optimization, when there are so many good practices that can be effective.
I first heard of comment spam in a compelling presentation given by Mike Grehan at a Search Engine Strategies conference a few years ago. He described how a memorial website he’d set up to honor and remember a friend who’d died ended up getting repeatedly spammed up with ads for all sorts of products and companies, until he had to take the open comment system private. Here’s an article he wrote about it as well.
I’d love to report to a state attorney-general the dishonest representations that Trackback Submitter makes on their site, and their work to spam up the internet, but it’s probably pointless, since the individuals responsible are likely all in Lithuania. Here is their domain registration information, if anyone could possibly stop them:
Registrant:
Pisau Skambinau
Ne durniems 15
Vilnius, Portugalija 57489
LithuaniaRegistered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: SUBMIT-TRACKBACK.COM
Created on: 16-Sep-06
Expires on: 16-Sep-07
Last Updated on: 16-Sep-06Administrative Contact:
Skambinau, Pisau ilasiene
Ne durniems 15
Vilnius, Portugalija 57489
Lithuania
60024897Technical Contact:
Skambinau, Pisau ilasiene
Ne durniems 15
Vilnius, Portugalija 57489
Lithuania
60024897Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.SUBMIT-TRACKBACK.COM
NS2.SUBMIT-TRACKBACK.COM
As for all you people out there who are already using Trackback Submitter and similar software, you may as well halt sending your spam attempts to NaturalSearchBlog.com. They’re not getting through, and they’re not going to. Stop wasting your bandwidth on us. If you’re looking to optimize your blog, I suggest that you read Stephan’s article on blog optimization which uses methods that are not going to get you penalized, banned, or reviled.
I have a new idea to help people who program spambots. Why don’t we create a badge to post on sites that are protected from comment spam, so that they can update their crawl lists to stop sending pointless submissions?
Popularity: 100% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 11/19/2006 | Permalink | 
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, Tools, Worst Practicesblack-hat-seo, Blog Optimization, comment-spam, forum-spam, search-engine-penalizations, spambots
Well, it works, it really works. The only problem - I don’t get an idea how it creates so many backlinks fast? Just take a look at siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.submit-trackback.com%2F&bwm=i&bwms=p&bwmf=u&fr=sfp&fr2=seo-rd-se
Dman, over 10.000 indexed backlinks in 2 months? How do they do that?
Comment by Eric — 12/1/2006 @ 4:38 am
Well, of course you must know how it creates backlinks — that’s the whole purpose of the software.
While that trackback site may show backlinks in Yahoo, it shows zilch in Google.
A million backlinks are nearly worthless, if you’ve been penalized.
Comment by Chris Silver Smith — 12/2/2006 @ 7:21 pm
It’s a shame a venture of this kind is finding a shelter in the country I was born. The country somehow has managed to keep its spam profile low. The domain registration info is insulting by itself. It reads “Called, Copulated”, followed by what appears a valid married female last name, Ilasiene (Ilasius for its masculine form). “Ne durniems” is “Not For Fools.” An authority in the country under the helm of the Ministry of Transport and Communications can squelch them, that entity is www.rrt.lt.
Comment by Tomas — 12/25/2006 @ 6:06 pm
How is everybody so sure they have been penalized?
I mean, I would love it to be true, but we have no hard evidence that it is the case.
The site has been around for just a few months and it is possible that Google just hasn’t assigned a PR to it yet. The same thing with the backlinks.
We do know they rank in the SERPs for phrases like ‘trackback submission’ (the word submission is not even on their page). Same thing with Yahoo.
To me it doesn’t look like these guys have been banned. And although the no-follow attribute may hurt them with Google (in the sense that the spam links should not count as votes), other search engines are not as stingy.
Comment by JoseOnate — 1/8/2007 @ 10:09 am
Regardless if they are penalized or not. The software can easily get 10,000 links to a site and if you have hundreds of sites running you are going to get traffic from those links. So even though they have no PR or rankings they still get traffic enough to make money.
Comment by Hmm — 2/1/2007 @ 5:54 am
Hi
I want to all of you know, World is mine, and yoursite good
G’night
Comment by GramBorder — 3/19/2007 @ 7:48 pm
Nice article. I noticed that trackback submitter had some PR now.
Comment by JRE — 4/21/2007 @ 9:19 pm
The problem is not all search engines devalue ‘nofollow’ and even though Google says it conveys zero weight it is used as part of the overall link equation such as link growth velocity, pyramid distribution of PR across all links to indicate natural vs. unnatural growth.
There’s also the possibility that in the future Google will reverse what it has done with nofollow. There is movement within the blog community to UNDO nofollow because it’s not worth punishing 99% of the people who deserve link recognition for the 1% of spamdexers out there.
Their website has zero PR because Google penalized them. But that’s because it is *obvious* they are spammers - they sell the darn software. But how will Google detect that a “normal” website or blog is a spammer assuming link growth doesn’t get tagged as “unnatural”. There are many sites that use bot submission in moderation.
Finally, there will always be thousands and thousands of blogs that do not have nofollow deployed, so bot comment submission like this will always find “vulnerable” blogs.
Comment by Tom — 7/20/2007 @ 11:01 am
their website www.submit-trackback.com has PR-3
How google didnt blocked them??
Comment by Vase — 8/2/2007 @ 11:25 pm
Vase - note that I wrote this story in November of last year - things change over time.
Also, I noted that there is a benign use of Trackback Submitter - using it to automatically link your blog stories up with other blogs which quote them is useful. Perhaps for that reason their site isn’t completely delisted from the Google index. But, if they were cleaner, they’d likely be able to rank higher than they are.
Comment by Chris Silver Smith — 8/2/2007 @ 11:45 pm
I find trackack-submitter does has SOME good use in the world of blogging, more worse than good. I have thought of using it myself, however, found more bad than good would come from such a product. I advise any other webmasters to refrain from the use of such product, really, its just more of a hassle to the ones working hard to make it somewhere on the internet. trackback spam is only making things worse
Comment by Finance And Credit — 9/19/2007 @ 8:29 pm
The best way to get backlink is give a good comment or review to the related blog. Just like i’m doing..
Comment by Rita NM — 12/22/2007 @ 3:54 am
I was googling to understand about trackbacks and here I am. Wouldn’t it all get more simpler if search engines give less importance to track back itself?
Comment by KingK — 12/24/2007 @ 7:09 pm
I was looking for info on this ‘grey/black hat’ stuff today. For the term -trackback submitter- they are n° 1 in Google. According to seodigger they have 63 top 10 rankings in Google!!
And there’s another piece of software called Trackback Spider that gets very good comments too.
Then I’m thinking: Why the hell am I doing all this stuff manually???
Comment by Kurt Naulaerts — 1/3/2008 @ 10:32 am
KingK: yes, it would be simpler if search engines didn’t give link love to the trackback. However, they do want to count some links from webpages for ranking purposes, and some links from within blog comments, too, I’d guess.
I’m not super-averse to trackback links/comments for posts that are related. For instance, if someone commented about this article on their blog, I entertain the option of allowing their trackback-submitted comment to appear, since it is related and it can help endusers check out criticism of what I’ve written or get additional information that others have.
I’m mainly against it for the level of abuse going on with it — it’s used too much for pure comment spam, submitting comments with links that are to pages completely unrelated to a blog posting’s topic.
You can bet that each of the search engines continues to improve their ability to identify and devalue these types of links.
Comment by Chris Silver Smith — 1/3/2008 @ 12:37 pm
Oh well, they have now PR 4 at index page. So one should add nofollow to trackback urls!
Comment by Searcher — 1/17/2008 @ 8:14 am
Definetly Trackback Submitter is SPAM Machine.
Comment by Richard Park — 2/12/2008 @ 11:34 pm
Google policy it’s clear: do not use automated software to obtain rank or backlinks, that’s the answer of all this post.
Comment by free — 4/21/2008 @ 12:43 pm