Trackback Submitter is one of the most popular link building tools used by spammers and users of black hat SEO. It abuses the feature called Trackback which allow bloggers to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. 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. 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.
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