Every now and then I'd get an email saying that I had received a "trackback" which is when someone else links to one of your articles in order to quote it, dispute it, or something like that. I don't get them very often, so when an email comes in that says trackback, I would click the link and see who was linking to me.

Every now and then, I would see a trackback that went to some link-farm so I'd delete it. Sometimes people would leave a comment on an old article and either put a link in the body or use the website box to make their name a link to some link farm. A month or two ago, I got a slew of trackbacks all at once, about 20 spam sites all linking to the same page of mine. I went to the page they had linked to and deleted them all. What a pain in the ass.

Then it happened again a couple weeks ago when I was at home. I took the ten minutes to sit there and delete them all. I also started noticing on my activity page that the page views would shoot up to to 600, 700, 900 per day, which is a far cry from what I normally get. I found out that there was a blacklist function in the DasBlog configuration, so I added the pertinent terms. The next day would be more of the same but this time would be a refinance push instead of a drug push. Then casinos, then Texas hold 'em... you get where this was going. Everytime I added that day's terms, they would switch up and attack a different term the next day. It's proactive and a losing battle. I just ignore it now and gave up wondering what my REAL traffic is per day.

This morning, I was in a training session and we took a break to get up, wiggle around, stretch our limbs, go to the bathroom, whatever. I checked my email. :) First thing I noticed was that there was about 30 emails, all with the same timestamp, all trackbacks to the same page. I went to the page and deleted them all, and then went back to Outlook and deleted the notifications. When I clicked refresh, my blood chilled... up at the top, it said 1-35 of 691. I quickly went through it and saw that I had 680 splog trackbacks and 11 emails. FUCK ME IN THE GOATASS! What the hell? I suppose I should be flattered that someone thinks my website is important enough to target for spamming to help raise their profile in search engines, but then the reality of it says "no, you're just a random target" :)

For now, I've turned off the trackback service, decreasing the functionality of my website. If the comments start getting spammed in earnest, I'll shut them off, too.. decreasing the functionality and value even further. There's a way to turn off the referral stuff in a newer version of this software, but there is no RBL for splogs built in... yet. Now that I have my email under control, this is the last thing I need to 'harden'.