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- John
I'm not sure I follow. What are exerts? And what do you mean by quotes that are comments? Are these really comments or are they trackbacks? And yes, there is such a thing as trackback spam.
- John
Firefox 3 Missing Go Button
May 5, 2008 on 7:05 pm ¦ In Uncategorized ¦JAB Creations wrote an interesting post today on Firefox 3 Missing Go Button
Here’s a quick excerpt
Which brings up yet another point: Microsoft has only been updating Internet Explorer because of market share being lost to Firefox. Thankfully Internet Explorer 8 will once finished equal Opera in quality save for some JavaScript, …Read the full post here
The big questions:
- spammer/scraper sites or legit looking?
- excerpts of full text
- all articles or occasional one?
Depending on how you answer those questions I would say the answer could be anywhere between "Woohooo! You have a fan!" and "Change your RSS feed, check your logs, block suspicious activity, file a DMCA with their ISP".
I would say that it's pretty common for a blogger to do this on a case-by-case basis when he doesn't have something to say or just thinks that your post is worth noting. That, in my book, is pure flattery. There are a couple of bloggers who regularly do this with articles I write and they have ended up being my biggest non-google traffic source and I've written short articles on their blogs directly. I consider them friends, not competitors. Three years later, we try to help each other and have all benefited. It's the way the informational web should be.
If it is truly automated and they are doing it for every post, you might want to stop it, but personally, if it's just a short excerpt like the one you showed, I would be pretty happy about it. I would actually probably write the person a note of thanks for the honor of publishing my teasers and try to connect with that person. Could be a good person to know for many reasons. They might send you traffic, business or just good vibes.
Now if you abbreviated the quote and they are republishing your whole article, I would probably change up my RSS feed to send only a small snippet and I would try to work my URL in near the top of the post. I'd probably watch my logs as well and then consider blocking suspicious IPs/user agents.
When you ask whether they are doing it for backlinks, I assume you mean the automated trackbacks at the bottom of your posts? Could be, but unless it looks like a spammer site, I would say they are doing it just because they like what you write or possibly for the trackback, but looking to attract your audience not your link juice, so no-follow won't help. And frankly, I've blogged on a topic and linked to popular articles on Newsweek.com and such that get thousands of visitors per day, and very few follow the trackbacks (I didn't even know that Newsweek did trackbacks until the inbound traffic showed up in Google Analytics). All in all, I would say you're getting the better part of the deal with respect to traffic flow.
There are lots of image/links that when you click them it requests to to install 'Zango' (by Zango, Inc.).
Additionally this one part made it clear that it's automated...
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I approve all initial posts. I am not aware if they post a second time if it also has to be approved if I have not yet made an initial approval. I'm not sure if WordPress allows or blocks posting or merely queues it in other words.
My concern isn't so much traffic flow as protecting my site's visitors from navigating to a potentially hazardous website. I looked up 'Zango' on Wiki and it lists it as unwanted/adware.
I just checked today's access log and don't see a single referrer from the domain linking back to mine. The only conceivable benefit is that Google may add it as a vote however I would presume Google would give my site a negative 'vibe' by allowing a link back to a site clearly automated.
...I think I'll click spam for this one.
- John
I still don't understand why there are comments on your site that have excerpts from your site (sounds more like trackbacks than comments).
In any case, do you have Akismet activated? I would expect it to catch 99% of these and flag them as spam (you need an API key before Akismet will function).
Maybe they are trackbacks? I'm not familiar with the terminology. It looks the bot in question targets text at or around the center of the article to create a sense that a human being was directly responsible for the snippet (neutral word I guess).
We'll see how this goes, thanks! :)
- John
- I like it so I mention it on my blog and I link to you.
- When I post, my Wordpress (or whatever platform) typically auto-discovers outbound links and pings your site and says "someone is talking about you"
- By default your system (WP, Moveable Type, whatever) then posts a small excerpt, commonly intermingled with comments, but not really comments themselves, with a return link saying, essentially, hey look, they're talking about me over here.
Trackbacks and pingbacks both conform to a given spec and are subclasses of linkbacks (which doesn't have a spec and is a generic term).
The key difference between trackbacks and pingbacks are that:
Trackbacks: require no return link, pinging site sends the excerpt.
Pingbacks: pingbacks ping the site mentioned in the link, which then goes out and verifies that there is an active link and parses the page and grabs an excerpt of its own creation.
Pingbacks are generally considered less susceptible to spamming, b/c the post has to exist and link to yoru site and does not control the excerpt.
In any case, I think you can see how I might use this for nefarious means. I would simply find thousands of blogs (ideally related) and make garbage posts with tons of links to those sites, who then end up with a spam trackback, much easier than creating a bot to comment spam those sites.
[edited by: ergophobe at 9:28 pm (utc) on May 6, 2008]
The API key is free, can be used on multiple sites and is not limited to use with WP. The plugin install/activation process should take you through it.
