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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 [1].

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 [2] 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 [3] 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
Lithuania

Registered 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-06

Administrative Contact:
Skambinau, Pisau ilasiene@freemail.lt
Ne durniems 15
Vilnius, Portugalija 57489
Lithuania
60024897

Technical Contact:
Skambinau, Pisau ilasiene@freemail.lt
Ne durniems 15
Vilnius, Portugalija 57489
Lithuania
60024897

Domain 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 [4] 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?

diet secrets [5]
lexen extreme [6]