Trackback Submitter: The Dark Site of Blog Comments

After installing DoFollow, the blog started getting hit by a peculiar sort of spam comment.

Akismet had always been catching the porn comments, and those submitters didn’t care whether DoFollow was installed or not. The latest spam comments are from someone using a tool called Trackback Submitter. The comments were obviously auto-generated, and included a programming bug. Here’s the one that keeps showing up:

This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title nline Opportunity. Thanks for informative article

Note the title of the blog is missing the first O. The sales page (link omitted because I don’t endorse this software) for the software claims it’ll help your SEO efforts by providing your choice of anchor text submitted to thousands of targeted blog. Never mind that you’ll be spamming all those blogs with automated comments.

One of the interesting selling points of the product is this:

The only trackback submitter on the Internet which bypasses comments anti-spam plugins used on blogging software. That’s right! It does not matter that your website is not any kind of blog and you do not link to blog where trackback links are submitted, because unique Anti-Spam Killer feature makes your website to look like a standard blog which is linking to victim’s blog. Make other webmaster to worry – “How the hell this trackback got approved by anti-spam plugin, if it is not any kind of blog and even does not link to me!?”.

That’s funny, since the first I saw of these comments was in Akismet’s spam folder. Another selling point was the autogenerated comments that appear natural, when the only one I keep getting in my spam folder is the one I quoted above.

When you run across products like this, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the bloggers you’ll be spamming. They have full control over their blog, and can easily delete comments they consider to be spam. The only thing you accomplish by using a product like this is to alienate thousands of blogs on subjects similar to yours.

Put the time into making productive comments on those blogs and you’ll see much better results than by using a spam engine such as Trackback Submitter.

23 Replies to “Trackback Submitter: The Dark Site of Blog Comments”

  1. I smiled, reading this… I installed the DoFollow plugin this week, and was almost immediately deluged by similar spam. Fortunately, Askimet is quite brilliant… Links, links, so much foolish focus on links-at-all-cost… when in the end, any purchasing decision will have to be made by a real live spam-hating human!

  2. Eventually Google will devalue all blog comment links anyways. Same thing will happen with hrefs in forums.

    Here’s an idea – how about a product that scours the internet for spamdexing and then publishing that list. Would be neat to show a “worst offenders” list. You could build one to specifically target Trackback spam vs. traditional comment spam.

  3. Yes, since blog comments are not under the control of the site owner, that would be a reasonable move on Google’s part. It’s a moving target, though, as people come up with more creative ways to avoid the restrictions.

    I don’t have the link anymore, but there was a page on the trackback submitter site that listed blogs that had been submitted to. So they’ve already created the list. I forgot to check if they were follow tags, which would have been quite funny.

  4. The problem I’m getting now is that I get dozens of link comments. I had to change my settings to automaticlly put comments with 1 url in the text on moderation. Heck, someone was gutsy enough to leave a comment saying if I wanted the link to stop, I should email them. If I did that, I know that my inbox would get all that spam too.

  5. Yeah, giving them your email address would definitely be a bad idea! I do pretty well by forcing everyone’s first comment to be moderated. I haven’t had a spammer yet post a legitimate first comment in order to get past that filter. Akismet would probably catch those anyway.

  6. [quote post=”230″]Put the time into making productive comments on those blogs and you’ll see much better results than by using a spam engine such as Trackback Submitter[/quote]

    It’s not often that a review site that survives on sales takes the time to provide quality information that they won’t make a dime from. Thank you.

    A question for you or the other commenters: Have we come full-circle to ‘begging for links’ again? I’m fairly new to blogging but have been publishing online since 1999. It would seem that pinging and trackbacks have quickly become irrelevant, and that ‘social networking’, for most anyway, is a pretty big waste of time. Right or wrong?

  7. [quote post=”230″]A question for you or the other commenters: Have we come full-circle to ‘begging for links’ again? I’m fairly new to blogging but have been publishing online since 1999. It would seem that pinging and trackbacks have quickly become irrelevant, and that ’social networking’, for most anyway, is a pretty big waste of time. Right or wrong?[/quote]

    With the recent changes to the Google algorithms, I’d say that natural links are the best way to go. Links from social networking sites will still hold *some* weight for search engine results positoning, but not anything like before (use them for traffic, instead).

    So write content that people want to link to, and you can’t go far wrong. It’s harder now than it was even five years ago, due to the explosion of blogs on the Internet. The more blogs there are, the harder it is for someone to find your post, even if it is one they’d want to link to.

    Maybe rather than “begging for links”, it’s more about marketing your blog to get readers. That way, you have people who will want to link to your blog because they like (or hate) the content.

  8. People are always trying to use quicker and cheaper ways to market. If this blog spam thing subsides, there will be a whole new way to cut corners. Almost all the link building techniques I have heard of are a little sketchy. The best way so far is to give. Give a little, get a little. Give advice on a forum, give in an input on a blog post, give an ebook to a competitor, give an article to an ezine.

    White hat stuff. It’s slow, but it works.

    Sincerely,
    Devin T.

  9. I don’t agree with U. This is absolutely effective stuff. I’m using it since version 1.1 (while software was not so powerful as it is now), and version 4,4 is just amazing. Multiple domains support (I requested this feature from developer and he made it in very short time) allows to promote thousands of domains using single installation of Trackback Submitter. Cheers!

  10. [quote post=”230″]This is absolutely effective stuff. I’m using it since version 1.1 (while software was not so powerful as it is now), and version 4,4 is just amazing.[/quote]

    Glad you’re having good results with it. I’m going by what I see on this blog, which is that the automatic comments left typically don’t get past my spam filter, so they don’t do you any good.

    Congratulations, though, on leaving a real comment rather than the cheesy automatic ones, and getting a backlink as a result.

  11. [quote comment=””][quote post=”230″]This is absolutely effective stuff. I’m using it since version 1.1 (while software was not so powerful as it is now), and version 4,4 is just amazing.[/quote]

    Glad you’re having good results with it. I’m going by what I see on this blog, which is that the automatic comments left typically don’t get past my spam filter, so they don’t do you any good.

    Congratulations, though, on leaving a real comment rather than the cheesy automatic ones, and getting a backlink as a result.[/quote]
    [quote comment=”25089″]I don’t agree with U. This is absolutely effective stuff. I’m using it since version 1.1 (while software was not so powerful as it is now), and version 4,4 is just amazing. Multiple domains support (I requested this feature from developer and he made it in very short time) allows to promote thousands of domains using single installation of Trackback Submitter. Cheers![/quote]
    I’m just wondering how the software works. If it is just a directory of high ranking blog posts to which to comment on, I see nothing wrong with that. That’s almost like StumbleUpon or Digg in a sense, but I haven’t used the service nor seen screenshots.

    Could anyone fill me in on exactly how this stuff works?

  12. Hi Devin, I’m just going by what I read in the sales page for the software, but my understanding is that it submits comments automatically. You can specify a standard comment to be put on all the blogs, and use some substitution codes for the name of the blog to make it look personalized. You can have multiple stock comments that it rotates among, etc.

    A simple directory would be no big deal, and is what other software provides. An automatic submitter means the person isn’t ever seeing your blog or reading your post.

  13. [quote comment=””]Hi Devin, I’m just going by what I read in the sales page for the software, but my understanding is that it submits comments automatically. You can specify a standard comment to be put on all the blogs, and use some substitution codes for the name of the blog to make it look personalized. You can have multiple stock comments that it rotates among, etc.

    A simple directory would be no big deal, and is what other software provides. An automatic submitter means the person isn’t ever seeing your blog or reading your post.[/quote]
    Wow that’s pretty bogus. I see no evil in posting on a blog you’ve read, but that sounds like this company is promoting being a tool to get your website higher ranked. Thanks for the update.

    Sincerely,
    Devin T.

  14. I think a point that is being missed is what these auto submissions do to your reputation. Credibility is the single most important factor in building online reputation, and once you’ve lost credibility you’ve started down a long downward spiral.

    Take a look at high ranking blogs such as copyblogger.com or problogger.com or sethgodin.com. Do you think those guys have ever used auto comment utilities?

    Besides, it’s better to have fewer, higher quality backlinks to your site. With great free / inexpensive utilities out there like Comment Kahuna, and Comment Hut, you can spend less than an hour each day building 10 or 15 really high quality links back to your site.

    FYI, I found bloggeries.com using Comment Hut and found this blog on bloggeries.com

    -Steve

  15. [quote post=”230″]Besides, it’s better to have fewer, higher quality backlinks to your site.[/quote]

    Hi Steve, I love hearing people say this! I keep seeing on forums people who clearly don’t understand how SEO really works, so it’s good to have people stop by who understand the value of quality in-context links.

  16. Well, say what you want but it’s petty cool software. I’d like to see an option to parse sitemap files and add URLs from sitemaps to Trackback Submitter automatically, but it’s still the best trackback submitting software I’ve found during 2 years. Works very fast and has hundreds of options to play with.

    Jeremy

  17. I agree. People that are using Trackback Submitter are idiots. I have a do follow blog and get the same kind of crap comments. I now require the commenter to add to single digit numbers and post the answer before submitting a comment. This cut down by spammy comments to nearly nothing.

    On another note, Trackback Submitter is obviously spam software, but what do you think about Comment Kahuna? I used it to find your blog and auto fill my name, url, and email address. I never use it to prefill a comment. Using it to prefill the comment isn’t much different than using a comment bot…IMO.

    It is a great tool to connect with other bloggers and save time doing so. As long as your comment is unique and really adds to the discussion, it is a benefit for both bloggers.

  18. As a way to find relevant blogs, I’m all for Comment Kahuna. The temptation is always going to be there, though, to use it as a quick way to place junk comments for backlinks.

  19. This is NOT spam tool. I use Trackback Submitter promoting my whitehat sites. I submit only less than 100 trackbacks per day and do it for months. And I clearly see higher traffic and better rankings.

    So those “gurus” who believe that Trackback Submitter will not help getting indexed well, should shout their mouths.

  20. Hi Bryan, any tool designed to leave comments automatically can be used to spam blogs. You may not be using it that way, but I get dozens of comments every week left by this tool…the same comment left over and over again on multiple posts, showing that the person never read the post and that the comment isn’t real. That’s spam.

    Congratulations to you if you’re actually reading the posts and simply using the tool as an easy way to leave relevant comments.

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