All Entries Tagged With: "trackback"
Does Your Blog Ghostwriter Spam?
While Blog Content Provider paved the way into business blog ghostwriting, there are other services up and coming. We welcome them. It keeps us on our toes. But we’ve also noticed that most of these companies charge more than we do. Recently, a competitor engaged in a spam tactic that I think you all should know about.
Trackbacking is a legitimate practice that involves linking to another blog and the post from which you link appears as a comment on that other blog. Examples of this practice abound. But there are ways to game trackbacking and scam unsuspecting bloggers into approving an illegitimate trackback that is nothing more than spam.
It happened this way for us: On our Mortgage and Real Estate Blog I recently found a trackback that needed an admin approval (I highly recommend that you set your blog settings to require approval before all comments go live). You should also visit every site by a commenter or trackbacker to ensure the site is good. If the site itself doesn’t meet your approval then don’t approve the comment or trackback. I always do this.
When I visited the trackbacking site by clicking on the URL provided, I perused the blog post of the company feigning a legitimate trackback. The problem was that there was no link in the blog post leading back to our blog. In other words, they programmed their blog software to make it appear as if they were trackbacking to our blog, but the link wasn’t there. It was hidden. That way, the search engines see it, but human visitors do not, cutting off all traffic from their blog to ours. If I’d approved the trackback then the relationship between their blog and ours would have been one sided. They would have benefited from our traffic, but we would not have benefited from theirs.
This is called cloaking. It’s a practice that all of the search engines frown upon. It’s also a widespread practice by devious webmasters who try to gain an advantage in ways that are unfair. If your blogging company engages in this practice then I highly recommend that you drop them immediately and use a company that engages in legitimate and search engine approved tactics.
This trackbacker operating under the veneer of legitimate practices was a blog ghostwriting competitor trying to target real estate agents with their services. Beware of these types of spamming operations. They will hurt your business more than help it.
When Should You NOT Approve A Trackback Comment?
The secret is out: Trackbacks make great links. And it’s a really simple thing. Someone writes a blog post that you like and you respond on your own blog. If you use WordPress, you can copy the permalink of the blog post that you are responding to in the trackback field below the Write Post field. Your blog post will appear as a comment on the other blogger’s software Admin panel. They can approve or reject it. If they approve your trackback then your blog post will appear as a comment on their blog post, giving you a reciprocal link. If they reject your comment then you will be providing their blog with a one-way link and no reciprocal link love. Should you ever do that?
You bet. Keep in mind that one-way links are more valuable than reciprocal links, especially from relevant sites. It is considered tacky to reject trackbacks just because you want that highly coveted one-way back link. The content that appears in your comments is important too, for several reasons. But that doesn’t mean you should approve every trackback. There are times when you’d want to say “No” to that trackback. When are they?
You might reject a trackback for the following reasons:
- The comment is from a known spam site – If you know that a particular site is a known spam site, even if their trackback seems legitimate, then you might not want to approve their trackback comment.
- The trackback itself appears to be a form of spam and not really a true comment – Sometimes legitimate bloggers are guilty of spam too. It might be inadvertent or blatant. Either way, you have readers to protect.
- You are being linked to from a site whose mission and purpose you don’t agree with entirely – You have to be careful with this one. Just because you don’t agree with what they are doing doesn’t mean that everyone will disagree or that their business model is a bad one. But if it is obvious that what the blogger is doing is unethical or illegal then you shouldn’t promote it.
- The site is a non-relevant site and you don’t want to lose your blog readers to a non-relevant site – Sometimes you’ll get a link from a non-relevant site and you just don’t want to lose your visitors to that site.
- The blogger linking to you links to you too often – Some bloggers just overdo a good thing.
- The trackback is inconsistent with your comment policy – If you have a comment policy and a trackback blatantly is in violation, don’t make an exception just because it’s a trackback.
- The trackback is from a site that exists primarily for advertising – If the only content on a blog or website linking to you is advertising, other than content that you created, then don’t link back to them; this is just like spam.
- The site is a malware or warez site – Don’t send your readers anywhere you wouldn’t want to go.
These may not be the only reasons you’d want to reject a trackback comment, but these are good reasons not to keep those trackback comments alive on your site. You have readers to protect, so protect them. And protect your own reputation as well.
Link Love: Are You Promiscuous?
One of the blog strategies that you’ll often hear blog consultants tell their customers is to trackback to other blogs with comments that address what they are discussing. “Join the conversation” you will often hear them say. I’ve even said something similar a few times myself.
But there is more to it than merely linking for the sake of linking. You can do it too much.
You have to ask yourself some hard questions when you start to put together your link and trackback strategy. I’m not saying don’t ever do it. I’m just saying be a little discriminating.
Trackbacks are a form of marketing. You are essentially saying to the other blogger, “Hey, I’d like to dialogue with you and your readers about this topic.” It’s OK to address a topic on another person’s blog if you disagree with them on something. It’s even OK to agree with them and offer them some praise. You might think a topic is of such importance that it deserves not being passed over. And you might be right. But does it deserve a link? Do you have to trackback or are you simply trying to show someone you know more than they do?
We’ve been told countless times that trackbacks are a good source of inbound links. Not always. Some bloggers place “nofollow” tags in their comment links so you get no link juice. If that is the case then you’ll get no link quality out of your trackbacks. So why bother? There are other reasons why you might want to trackback. And there are reasons why you might not. You’ll have to decide for yourselves.
Remember this, while a trackback on another blog has the potential to deliver quality traffic to your blog from someone else’s. It also has the potential to drive traffic from your blog to theirs. It sounds crass, but just like you choose your sex partners carefully, you want to choose your link partners carefully as well. Spammers love all the attention.
