Fantastic! Someone thinks my post is fantastic!! See?
Daegan wrote a fantastic post today on “Dear John Reese: Are Tampon Sample â
Admittedly, the author is a bit muddled about my name, but they dropped me a link. Isn’t that exciting?! …Well….No. I know if I leave the trackback, my blog risks a Google penalty!
That trackback will soon link into a “bad neighborhood”. If you read further, you’ll discover why out-link to bad neighborhood’s could cause Google’s algorithm to suspect a blogger of posting paid links resulting in Google penalty!
But first: How to identify “Daegan Spam”:
- A trackback will quote some of your post, nearly always attributing your words to someone else. I’ve been called “Daegan”, “AnnPlugged” and a variety of other names.
- Often, the “Blog” consists of nothing but very, very short quotes. They don’t violate copyright and won’t cause you duplicate content issues. This may lead you to shrug it off and permit the trackback.
- On some blogs — when the spam is fresh- the collection of links are sort of interesting.
For example, today, a link lead me to a forum where someone advertised a LinkShield Link Protection, a service that will cloak affiliate links. That’s a type of product I might want to learn more about.
So, if you are aware of the danger, the spam is pretty easy to identify. Yet, it seems innocuous doesn’t it?
How could a link to that blog result in a Google penalty?
As the spammy trackback ages, the blog content becomes truly spammy. Idea Hustle, which originally left a trackback on my Duplicate Content Plugin, now redirects to a probably worthless paintball directory site, which could become anything in future.
If I leave this link in place and allow it to “follow”, I suspect I will soon be linking into into a site Google considers to fall in a “bad neighborhood”.
That’s bad for me because we know:
- Google’s algorithm examines what we link to determine our trust and page ranks.
- That paintball link look very spammy; after all, bloggers are often paid to link to these sorts of products.
- Google has been penalizing even very good sites for anything Google considers or suspect to be a paid link.
So, clearly we need to keep links like that off our blogs — especially if we “dofollow”. Luckily, the solution is easy!
Send “Daegen Spam” to Akismet!
Sending these to Akismet gets it of my blog, and also protects all blogs from this sort of spam.
Better yet, even if I miss one or two of these, I never actually give these places a dofollow. L’s Linky Love won’t give the follow until they drop at least 3 trackbacks. And after I get up date all my plugins (insert some cursing at WP here), I’m going to add a feature to LLL so I can periodically review sites that are currently “dofollowed”, that way, I can catch things retroactively. (I keep saying this… some day I’ll even do it! 
)
You are so mean to spammers. Appreciate them as they give you free links
I had no idea this was spam! I’ve been getting a few of these recently, I even commented one of them them, pointing out that my name was Caroline and not Michael!!
Your post makes a lot of sense, I just didn’t think about how this trackback method could be used to get spammy inbound links. That’s so sneaky. I’m now going through my comments getting rid of these!
I had to look twice when I received two of these trackbacks this morning.
I got several of these within hours of OpTempo going live on Oct 6. I was quite flattered to be spammed so quickly but I enjoyed sending them off to Akismet.
One trick I’ve seen more of recently are manual comments with links back to spammy sites being added to older posts. Looking at the IP addresses they came from visitors from India and elsewhere in SouthEast Asia. Hired comment guns for comment spammers.