I just discovered something that I should have known about before today.

I had nearly 100 spammy links on this website.

No, I wasn’t the spammer.

There were a combination of Comments and Trackbacks from others that were using articles I had published as link bait to either get traffic to their website, or fool search engines into thinking that their site was credible.

The first was easy to spot.  Someone would leave a comment often filled with keywords and a link that they wanted a reader to click on which had nothing to do with the subject of the article.

The second is really stupid.  Google and Bing/Yahoo have updated their algorithms to avoid giving these trackbacks any credibility.  As a matter of fact, they may even hurt the credibility of the original article.

Here’s an example:

The link goes to an article I wrote and it seems harmless, except the website that posted this is not a credible site.

2 questions arise:

1. How do I know if this is happening to my site?

2. How do I clean it up and stop it?

I guess that’s 3 questions.

This site is built with WordPress.  If your site is built with WordPress, sign in, go to the Dashboard, scroll down to the Comments and take a look.

I had 17 pages of over 300 comments.  I reviewed all 17 pages, and every comment to see if they were genuine or spammy.  If they were spammy, I unapproved them and marked them spam.  Then I deleted them permanently

Next I went to the Settings section on my Dashboard and looked at the settings I had for Discussion.  I changed the  Comment Moderation to hold any comment that includes 1 (or more) hyperlinks.  I get an email notifying me of these comments now.  I can look at at and decide if it is spam or genuine as they occur.