Trackback Submitter is one of most popular link building tools used by spammers and lovers of black SEO

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...

. Developed by an unknown spammer from Europe in September 2006, Trackback Submitter became very popular because of its ability to bypass comment spam protection used on popular blogging systems like Wordpress

WordPress

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system . It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1...

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Overview

Trackback Submitter is based on the PHP programming language and works on Apache powered servers which have cURL and Zend Optimizer installed. The script uses unknown functions to find thousands of blogs which have comments posting enabled. Once the software finds a related blog, it generates random comments automatically (if not pre-defined by user) and submits these comments including one or more backlinks to the spammer's websites. Then the tool determines if the comment was accepted successfully and if so, the blog URL is added to a database for later use.

Effectiveness

Once Trackback Submitter was covered on Search Engine Journal and other popular SEO blogs, its popularity increased dramatically and some blog owners were forced to disable trackback feature or moderate each comment to prevent this software from hacking their spam protection plugins like Spam Karma and others.

External links

• Article about Trackback Submitter on Search Engine Journal
• Blog spam today