I have often heard it said, RSS Pieces can be sooo restrictive. And it is true. We don't let our clients do anything they want with their blogs. When you stray too far from the sidewalk on an RSS Pieces blog, you will get a call from Mother Superior (Ines and Laurie started calling me this recently when I told them "no" to trackbacks.) The reason is simple, I've been in the SEO world for some time now and know what is good for a blog and what is bad. I try to avoid having our bloggers learn hard lessons, but every once in a while we have that one or in this case, two rebellious bloggers that insist, no, relentlessly nag us to turn on functionality we simply do not agree with. This is the true story of my terribly rebellious blogger, Ines Hegedus-Garcia.

Read also: Are you a real estate blog link whore?

I confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault......and now the penitence is massive!! For all of RSS Pieces blog clients, if you have been getting bombarded by spam....It was me, my fault, I confess - call me, e-mail me, whip me, curse me.....

This is how it went down: Laurie and I were talking of how nice it would be to have trackbacks activated on our blogs. When we asked Mary, this was her response:

"Trackbacks are just spam"

But, but....everyone is using them! All the big real estate bloggers trackback from one site to the next! Plus it would be a nice way to keep track of who's making reference to our content. We know Mother Superior (Mary) runs a strict school here and we must abide by her rules to keep us safe and to Kick Butt when it comes to SEO....but wouldn't it be nice to rebel?

I WANT TRACKBACKS! I WANT TRACKBACKS! I WANT TRACKBACKS!

I still don't know if they granted my wish to make me learn on my own (sometimes even mothers teach their young how to let go), or just to have a little fun - hmmmmm

In order to turn on trackbacks for me, they had to turn them on in the RSS System, which would mean that all RSS Pieces blogs would receive spam if trackbacks were turned on their sites.

Even with the strong spam filtering systems behind our sites, I received 12 spam comments in the first 5 hours of those darn trackbacks being "on" - from Viagara, to Ephedra, Dirt Cheap Airline Tickets, Credit Problem solutions, Percocet, Adderall women weight losss, etc. - So the scoop is that spam sites have figured out a way to break the trackback codes and spam the life out of our blogs (even with filters), and considering that a lot of us get over 2,000 unique visits per day........that turns out to be an unmanageable amount of spam.

So, now I have my tail between my legs, my hands stretched out in front of me for Mother Superior to smack me with her ruler and I learned my lesson: stick to the rules, be an obedient follower do not rebel.........for now 

-Ines Hegedus-Garcia, Miami Real Estate

Now, are trackbacks really that bad? No. The theory is great and up until about 6 months ago, when trackback spam went crazy, it was a good idea to turn them on. However, unless you intend to manage them regularly and moderate them, you should consider them a waste of time. We run a bunch of great spam filters on our platform, but trackback spam is just so prevelant that if you have a ton of traffic, it may not be worth the hassle to turn them on.

What is a Trackback?

TrackBack is a tool that bloggers use to allow you to visit other sites related to your post. Wikipedia gives the definition of a TrackBack as "a mechanism for communication between blogs". Most blogging formats allow the feature. Let's start from the beginning. You are posting an article for your blog and find related information that you want to include in your post. You will create a link within your post using the URL for that information. This will allow someone to see the related information directly from your site. Depending on what blogging platform you are using, you will find the place to list TrackBack or backlist. Just place the URL here. This achieves multiple objectives:

• Each TrackBack allows you to have a conversation between blogs
• It is seen by the search engines as an emphasized link
• It is a courtesy for other bloggers to see where they are getting traffic from
• It will allow readers to follow an article between multiple blogs

The only downside to TrackBacks is that you need to be careful of the TrackBacks to your site from spammers. Sometimes you will get a TrackBack from a site that is totally unrelated to yours. This can diminish your SEO efficacy. Take the time to edit and delete these TrackBacks from your comments so that it doesn't harm your ranking.

Read also: What is a trackback?

Why is trackback spam so popular and so difficult to guard against?

Sping is short for "spam ping", and is related to fraudulent pings from blogs using trackbacks, called trackback spam. Pings are messages sent from blog and publishing tools to a centralized network service (a ping server) providing notification of newly published posts or content. Spings, or ping spam, are pings that are sent from spam blogs, or are sometimes multiple pings in a short interval from a legitimate source, often tens or hundreds per minute, due to misconfigured software, or a wish to make the content coming from the source appear fresh.

Spings, like spam blogs, are increasingly problematic for the blogging community. Estimates from Weblogs.com and Matt Mullenweg's Ping-o-Matic! service have put the sping rate - the percentage of pings that are sent from spam blogs - well above 50%. A study commissioned by Ebiquity Group and conducted by the University of Maryland in 2006, confirms that these numbers are around 75%. ^[1] Since then, growth in sping has slowed such that the portion of pings that are spam has dropped to 53%.^[2]

As you can see the very nature of a trackback allows it to be very easily used for spamming purposes and that is why even though you can run anti-spam programs, you still wind up having to moderate a good deal of trackback spam.

The other reason i am not a fan of trackbacks is beacuse if you have a popular blog like RSS Pieces, you can very easily dilute the value of your comments with tons of trackbacks which can be very annoying to visitors trying to read and respond to the comments.