Even the gurus will agree with what is being said here. I am glad I found it….

So here is my question. Can there be legitimate commercial trackbacks? Unlike commercial email where there are subscriptions, trackbacks are open for everyone by design. What if you were posting about “the purple pill” and you got a single trackback advertising “the purple pill” for sale. Would that be spam? What if they actually linked to the page so that it was a 100% legitimate trackback?

This is a tricky one.. I think this is more just an issue of etiquette. There’s a disagreement among a lot of bloggers as to when and when not to use trackback — i.e., is it appropriate to send a trackback ping without actually linking to the URL you pinged. I think unless the URL being pinged is explicitly designed to aggregate content, you should actually link to the URL you are pinging — it facilitates the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” feedback mechanism in trackback pings.

So, to use your “purple pill” example, I don’t think it would be appropriate if the ping was from a URL that was nothing more than an advertisement for the purple pill, because it adds nothing to the URL being pinged and doesn’t involve a thread of conversation. That said, I think it’s really just very context sensitive. For example, if someone were to come up with the One True Solution to referer spam, I wouldn’t see any problem with them pinging this URL, even if they didn’t link to it directly.

True spam of course is not really relevant to these nuanced discussions of etiquette, though, because there’s no content analysis going on. They are just spamming their URLs to as many places at once.

I don’t think there’s any real problem with commercial-oriented trackbacking as long as it a) doesn’t overwhelm or clutter up the post being pinged unecessarily, and b) there’s an indication that there was some forethought behind the ping — i.e. there’s an obvious contextual link between the URL being pinged and the URL offered.

So here is my question. Can there be legitimate commercial trackbacks? Unlike commercial email where there are subscriptions, trackbacks are open for everyone by design. What if you were posting about “the purple pill” and you got a single trackback advertising “the purple pill” for sale. Would that be spam? What if they actually linked to the page so that it was a 100% legitimate trackback?

I delete hundreds of trackback spam every couple of days. It is a big problem, but I think the question of acceptable commercial trackbacks is a valid one.

I think the biggest danger posed by Referrer SPAM is the loss of commercial value it brings to not just blogs but all websites. After all, until the ‘bots start shopping, advertisers are only going to be interested in human eye balls. In other words: when an advertiser asks me, “How many page views do you get each month?” that advertiser isn’t wanting to know how many ‘bots read my site, but how many people read my site. Referrer SPAM is an example of humanity using technology to attack humanity– shoot ourselves in the foot, if you will. Interestingly enough, those who use Referrer SPAM will also see a devaluation of their own websites as more and more idiots take up its use.

Such morons we’ve become as we bow to the technology we’ve created.