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Over the past few months the amount of pingback spam I’ve been getting has begun to get out of hand.

What are PingBacks?

A PingBack occurs when another Wordpress site links to a post on your own wordpress site. A quote from the post that linked to your site is published as a comment on your site with a link back to the site that linked to you.

(Note: I’ve stated Wordpress as that is the most common platform that uses pingbacks, but other blogging platforms use it too.)

Confused - I’ll try and explain again:

1. Post on Site A Links to a Post on Site B
2. Site B’s post displays a quote from the Post on Site A (usually in the form of a comment at the end of the post).

Benefits: Site A gets a free link back and Site B shows the other sites discussing the post.

I Like PingBacks…

You can turn PingBacks off in Wordpress but I like to leave PingBacks switched on because:

a) It encourages people to link to you because they will get a link back from the post they link to.

b) My readers can see other sites discussing the post and find other opinions and information.

What is PingBack Spam?

PingBack spam is where people abuse the PingBack system to get free links back (and subsequently traffic) to their site.

This is usually done when spam sites simply republish a post (or an excerpt of a post) from your site and link back to it. The link to your post triggers a PingBack to be posted on your site.

But the idea of a PingBack is that it links to other sites discussing your post - not other sites republishing your posts.

Spam Getting out of Hand

Things have really got out of hand lately with spammers systematically republishing other people’s blog posts and linking back to them to get free links through pingbacks. This is being done on a massive scale.

My sites were getting so much PingBack spam it was becoming impossible to moderate and I was close to switching off PingBacks altogether, which I didn’t want to do because PingBacks in themselves are a great feature.

Most Common PingBack Spam

The most common PingBack spam were pingbacks which usually contained a quote such as:

"Jason wrote an interesting post"
"Unknown wrote an interesting post"
"Someone wrote an interesting post"
etc etc…

This is pretty easy to fight automatically.

How to Fight PingBack Spam

If you use Wordpress then get the Spam Karma plugin which is a useful tool for fighting comment spam.

Unfortunately Spam Karma is not very effective at fighting PingBack spam unless you make some little changes…

Powering Up Spam Karma to Fight PingBack spam:

Regex Blacklist

Go to your Spam Karma blacklist options and add the following to your blacklist (including the # symbols on either end):

#wrote an interesting post#

You need to add it to the "regex blacklist" and "regex content blacklist".

Now whenever Spam Karma comes across one of those many posts with the phrase "wrote an interesting post" it will treat it as spam.

If you come across any other phrases that are common in the PingBack spam then add those too.

.info blacklist

You can also add .info to your domain blacklist and this will stop any comments and pingbacks containing links to .info domains.

With so many .info domains being used for spam this can be quite effective at reducing pingback spam - but you could get the occasional false positive form a genuine .info domain.

Regularly Moderate PingBack Spam

Whenever you moderate a comment in Spam Karma it will automatically add the domain and some other details to a blacklist.

You’ll find a lot of pingback spam will keep coming from the same domains until you put a stop to it.

So if you moderate your comments regularly your blacklist will stay up to date with the domains, IPs etc. that Spam Karma should treat as spam.

PingBack Spam Now Manageable

Doing all the above has substantially reduced the amount of time I’ve had to spend dealing with PingBack spam.

Please feel free to share your ideas for fighting PingBack spam…

Tags: pingback, spam, spam karma

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.