Hard News, Inc.

An Explanation of Trackback Spam (abbreviated)

This post is being used as a means to demonstrate what a legitimate trackback looks like, and how it should be used.  The site it's pinging is Dave Mitchell's "Sparsely, Sage..." blog about West Marin County - a freshly hatched blog that is already building up some impressive traffic stats.

Usually a trackback is a comment that someone is making on something you wrote that is hosted on their site.

Let me explain.

Say you write something about the Bolinas Water Board.  Someone from the board reads it and wants to respond.  This person also has a blog (or website).

Only their response won't fit into the small space alloted for comments.

So what they do is write a long response with charts, graphs and photos, all in support of your brilliant proposition that the Bolinas Board should just hook up the sewage outflow pipes to the water inflow pipes to create the perfect closed system.

The Board member then publishes this article on their blog and in the little space that says "Trackback" - they put in the web address for your article.

Now the real fun begins.  The Board member's site sends a "ping" (like in the old submarine movies) to your site saying in effect "Hey, there's this article here that says that it's related to what you wrote. Here's the first paragraph and a link to the article."

Then, in your comments section, a little comment appears that starts out with the first 200 or so characters of whatever the Board member wrote, usually something like "I was reading Dave Mitchell's brilliant blog the other day, and his innovative (albeit stinky) solution to the Bolinas Water problems sparked a thought ..." (click here for more)

Readers of your blog then can click the link to find out what it is that the Board member has to say. It's a nifty little bit of technology that bloggers use to engage in backscratching, logrolling, one-hand-washing-the-otherism.

One of the things that it does is to help bloggers boost each other's rankings on Google and Technorati. These search engines look to see how important a blogger/website is by checking to see how many people are linking to its content.  If you have a lot of original content, a lot of people will link to you, saying "Hey, I read this really original bit of news the other day..."

Thus, Google, Technorati, Blogpulse, et al., all figure that you are someone that is actually putting in work, coming up with interesting, original content, and that as such, you should be rewarded for that.

Now then. (Cue ominous music) The unscrupulous scam artists on the web have figured out that using trackbacks is a really great way to boost themselves up in the Google et al. rankings.  Long enough, at least, for them to be able to sell whatever it is that they're selling ("Fix your credit report!" "Get a 500 free porno movies" "Win at online poker!") before people figure out that they're scam artists/thieves/stealing credit card numbers for their white slavery ring in Belarus.

Thus, once a website/blog starts getting to a certain level, the spammers start sending trackback spam. Because if there's a link to a highly-ranked website, it tricks Google et al. into ranking their scam site a bit higher. In effect, the spammers start trading in on your good name and reputation to boost their own criminal enterprise.

The print equivalent would be someone sneaking into your printing press and stuffing a one-page snake-oil ad into the Light before it gets distributed.  Actually, that's comment spam - which is somewhat self-explanatory.

I guess trackback spam would be analogous to someone dressing up like a Point Reyes Light paper deliveryman and going around the West Marin neighborhoods and delivering the paper by knocking on the front door and distracting the housewife - whilst a confederate sneaks around the back, jimmys the kitchen door and makes off with Grandma's silver and the Franklin Mint Commemorative Elvis Presley dinnerplate collection.

This is why you get notifications as to when someone posts comments or trackbacks to your site.  That way, you can see if it's from a legitimate commenter with something to say - or if it's a guy in a black-and-white striped shirt with a Zorro mask tied around his eyes, wanting to borrow your delivery van for a few hours "to run some errands."

Moving on.

In your case, from what I can see, the comments are not from an outside source or scammer. It appears that for whatever reason, when you posted the new table of contents, with links to all your stories, what that did was trigger the technological "trackback" widget, which took the first few grafs of your post and then put it into your comment section, and sent you the notification to say "Whadday think about this guy, boss? Should we let him take the van? He says his granny is real sick and needs her medicine."

In this case, the guy asking for the van ... is you.

5 Things You Don't Know About Me

Mack Reed of LAVoice meme’d me about a week ago, to add to the list of “5 Things You Don’t Know About Me.” This is trickier for me than you might think; because of my current day job and my past day jobs, much of what might be interesting would result in mayhem and/or what Government Code Sections 3300 et seq. defines as “harm to the public service.”

Thus, I am going to delve back into earlier chapters in the Book of Dave to see if I can dredge something up that might surprise even those who have paid close attention to my long, pointless discursions…

1. The first time I ever drove a powered vehicle, it was an M-60 main battle tank. The occasion was an “Open House” at  Ft.Coy, in Wisconsin in 1970. At the time, the Pentagon was desperately trying to spiff up its public image – something about an unpopular foreign war, massive anti-draft riots and a faltering presidency. Anyway, they invited all the good Midwestern people in for a day where the sullen and suspicious draftees were put through their paces. Since my dad was then a Major in the Army Corps of Engineers, I got to sit on the lap of a tank driver and peer through the hatch as the huge metal beast grumbled and bellowed up an incline. I was very upset that I had to leave before they fired the main 105mm cannon. I still remember the sight of junked cars pinwheeling through the air more than a mile away, where the explosive shell hit. Then the F-4 Phantom jets came overhead and really unloaded. This experience led to my lifelong fascination with heavy equipment and gadgets that make lots of noise.

2. I have only been mugged once in my life. This was while I was driving by myself across Oaxaca. I pulled into a gas station in the middle of the jungle and was looking out at the way the tropical vegetation was already prying at the fresh-poured concrete slab. I turned around, and two sweaty, desperate campesinos were brandishing machetes and demanding money. They were about ½ my size. But they held the machetes in tough, leathery hands and looked like they knew how to swing them. They were clearly not career banditos. I think they were just a couple of guys in a bad space in their lives who saw me as the equivalent of manna from heaven. I handed over a thick wad of bills that added up to about $50 U.S. and then sprinted away from me and into a pickup truck and screeched away.

3. Despite serious, total-out car wrecks, falling 3 stories onto my face on a concrete sidewalk, being shot, run over and set on fire, I have never broken a bone in my body. Must be the thick bones from all the cheese & milk from growing up in America’s Dairyland.

4. The FBI tapped my phones after the Oklahoma City/Tim McVeigh bombing.  I was in Kingman Arizona, trying to use a local neo-Nazi punk as a source. I later found out that the kid had been booted out of the Nazis not because he had found enlightenment (he claimed he had woken up one day and realized that killing a minority just to be admitted was “bad”), but because he was a dimwit meth freak.

5. [original story excised for being too dark and disturbing]

5a. When I was a bored paparazzi, we used to prank-call known irascible movie stars. Such as, we'd call James Woods and ask, "Is your refrigerator running? Better go catch it! Ha!" and then hang up.  Just totally stupid stuff, the more infantile, the better.  Sometimes I wonder if that was the real reason Sean Young lost her marbles so spectacularly... Ah, the halcyon days before caller ID became common.

 

And now it's my turn to pass on this meme; first, to Canuckistan's Dr. Tongue in his 3-D House of Pancakes; then to erudite Kung-Fu Monkey; high-def camera guru Mike Curtis at HD for Indies; freelance writer guru Angela Booth; and the highly caffeinated SharBean.