I though I’d share this: recently I’ve seen some seemingly pointless trackback spam that appeared to have come from the main sites of Yahoo, MSN, Google ..etc. I could not figure who benefited from these, since there was not even a hidden link to any other site. Still, I went ahead and clicked “delete and block” since, after all these were spam entries.
Today someone told me I came up third on a particular Google search, so of course I went ego-surfing, and voila! there I was – but I clicking through gave an error message. Now, why would Google be an illegal referrer? Then it hit me: when I blocked those seemingly harmless trackbacks, I actually blocked just about all major search engines! Checking my firewall entries, I found Yahoo, MSN, Microsoft, Google blocked. So if you suspect you received such spam, this may be a good time to check your blocked domains.
The good news: despite my stupid act, site traffic in this period not only hasn’t dropped, it actually increased – I don’t even want to know how much more it would be without the bogus blocks…
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Tags: spam, trackback spam, spamback, trackspam, comment spam, spomment, page views, search engines, blog search, google juice, google, msn, microsoft, yahoo, blog traffic
Hey Zoli,
Though I still don’t understand what the people gained by doing this to you (unless, of course, they just really didn’t want you getting traffic), what’s more interesting to me is your traffic trends.
I wonder if this speaks to the blogosphere as a whole — whereas survey after survey has shown that 80-90% of web users find web pages through search engines, clearly that isn’t the case for your blog if traffic is still growing.
I’d imagine these surveys would be vastly different for people who use syndication (and aggregators) than for those who don’t. I know I personally probably split my time from finding links from blogs about 50% of the time and finding links from Google about 50%.
That makes me slightly wonder — if syndication (RSS/Atom/etc) takes off and goes mainstream — what effects will it have on search engines? Clearly it’s not as black and white as that, but it’s an interesting thought nonetheless.
Ian
Hi Ian,
Thanks for commenting 🙂 It’s been a while I checked, and can’t check now, since the stat’s would be skewed, but I used to gave a fairly large ratio of technorati vs. google and the other majors … which would indicate a lot of readers are blog-users themselves (?). So by the same logic, it could be feed readers through verious aggregators, too.
I’ll check the stats in a week or soo, and see if there is any change.
One point I forgot to add is that the “blockout” obviously did not prevent search engines from finding my posts; it just prevented direct clicking on the title and arriving to the original post – you had to copy/paste the URL in yor browser.
Another observation re. stats: I often have days when site visits drop while feed subscription grows … go figure 🙂
Why Spam Swicki?
Search activity on my swicki (see right sidebar) skyrocketed all of a sudden. Here’s a partial list of searches performed yesterday:
ags publishing 1battle realms 1book publishers directory… 1bourbon street 1bourbon street new orlean… 1brick…
“Innocent” Trackback Spam Can Knock Your Page Views
[Source: Zoli’s Blog :: Main Page] quoted: I though I’d share this: recently I’ve seen some seemingly pointless trackback spam that appeared to have come from the main sites of Yahoo, MSN…