It seems that my post on trackback spam yesterday confused some people. I sometimes forget that not everyone is as fervent about the latest technical innovations geeky as I am. So to that end I am being very kind and giving you all a crash course in stuff you probably already know.

Blog

Erm … I’ll skip this and assume you all know what a blog is. If not try the WikiPedia.

Post

Each unique entry in a blog. Each post will have its own comments and trackbacks.

Comments

Comments are a user means of interacting with a blog. They normally consist of the commenter’s name, their email address, the URI of their homepage or blog, and a comment.

Trackbacks

Trackbacks are another tool in the cohesion of a blog as a community website. Whilst comments are used for short responses or even comments, the Trackback system allows a writer to track the progress of a post throughout the blogosphere.

Simply put a trackback is a way of automatically notifying the owner and readership of another blog that you have linked to or referred to one of their posts on your own site.

Trackbacks can be split into two groups – incoming and outgoing. To facilitate incoming Trackbacks you’ll need to have blogging software that supports them. Or you can use a third party tool such as Haloscan. Whatever you use the method is normally the same.

Each post will have a corresponding Trackback URL. For an example of a Trackback URL click here to see the URL for this post. In order to receive a Trackback the person wishing to acknowledge your post will have to “ping” that URL.

To send a Trackback you again need blogging software that supports it or a third-party tool. In the most basic example you will have to find the Trackback URL of the post you wish to ping and enter it into the “Trackback URLs to ping” box on your blog software or 3rd party tool. Then, when you submit your post you software will send a short message (or “ping”) to the Trackback URL, normally containing the name of your blog, the name of the author of the post, the title of the post and the permalink of the post.

With me so far? Good.

When this ping arrives at the URL the recipient’s blogging software takes over and adds your trackback to the list. It also returns a TB successful message to the originating blog.

I hope that’s pretty clear so far. If you want to try it out but don’t have trackback software installed then you can use this standalone trackback form. Simply fill in the info and hit submit. Then return to this post to see your trackback (note: it may take up to 10 minutes for your TB to be displayed).

There are other things that can make trackbacks even more complicated fun including auto discovery code (a block of hidden info for every post which contains the TB URL so certain software picks it up automatically) and alternative response codes but you should have the gist of it.

Referrers

No-one caught me out on yesterday’s post when I said that there where three new modes of spam but only talked about two of them. The third is referral spam. In order to understand that you need to understand the basis of referral logging.

Lets say that page a has a link to page b.

When you click that link page b receives a request to show the page but also gets a load of other info including the URL for page a! This referral info can be useful in showing which sites are driving traffic to your own site.

But it’s open to abuse – just take a look at my top 500 referrers page – nasty huh! I definitely don’t play that much poker.

Anyway, that should be enough for now. If you have any questions then you can always email me or even Skype me if you have Skype installed.