Lately, my sites receive a lot of spam comments via trackback feature.
Trackback is when someone puts a link to your site on his site. By approving such a comment you will also put a link to the other site on your blog. So basically, it’s a mutual link exchange. And the more external links lead to your site, the higher search engines rating it gets. Of course you don’t have to approve this comment, in this case you will still have a link pointing to your blog. On one hand, it’s nice to get that link. But trackback is easily abused, and scraping also occurs in many cases. Scraping is when the spammer just copy and pastes your entire article as a comment on his site, basically stealing your content. And since a spammers site usually has much more links pointing to it, and even though obtained through fraudulent means like trackback abuse, they still increase search engine ranking. So in the end, the stolen copy of your content appears much higher and closer to the first page of the search engine output then your own, original site. None of the search engine giants seem to care about that, so will have to set up a fight ourselves. As usual. Well of course you can use plugins such as Simple Trackback Validation and Akismet, but even though they stop spam comments dead in their tracks and in general make it easier for webmasters to identify spam through collaboration, they do nothing to stop stealing of your content. So, open the spam comments list. AS you can see, many of them come from the same IP addresses. Make a list of these addresses and then add them to htaccess file of your site in the following way. Well, that’s all. Spammer sites with these IP addresses will not be able to access your site anymore. As these are server IPs, it’s highly unlikely any human users are beside them, so don’t worry about a drop in views due to IP blocking. Whenever you receive a new spam trackback, just add the IP address to this list.