Prevent Trackback Spam when using Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin

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When version 1.2 of the G.A.S.P. (Growman Anti Spambot Plugin) WordPress plugin was released I noticed a ton of Trackback spam start pouring into my blogs, this version of the plugin no longer blocked Trackbacks and lacks any sort of filter for preventing spam Trackbacks.  In working with Andy Bailey the developer he quickly put together GASP 1.3 which has a check box which allows you to prevent any Trackbacks to your blog.

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However, many WordPress bloggers do want valid Trackbacks on their blog posts that link to other sites which may feature or talk about their articles, this helps show a posts publicity levels as well as lets a user link out to another site for cross traffic.  I am one of those people who don’t mind having valid trackbacks, in this case I would recommend you combine the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin with the Simple Trackback Validation with Topsy Blocker WordPress Plugin.

The Simple Trackback Validation plugin does two main validations to help prevent trackback spam.

  • Checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to. This will reveal almost all spam trackbacks.
  • Retrieves the web page located at the URL included in the trackback to check if it contains a link to your blog

This plugin does a really good job and caught 100% of the Trackback spam on my blogs over the 3 days I tested it, however by default the plugin will have your spam Trackbacks placed into the moderation queue.  This will force you to have to mark all those spam Trackbacks as SPAM or Trash them.  This is too time consuming, so I decided to have it set to Discard trackback altogether after I tested and showed it didn’t catch any false positives.

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So now I still highly recommend the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin for WordPress to manage your comment spam instead of Akismet, but if you are going to use this plugin and keep Trackbacks enabled then you need to companion it with the Simple Trackback Validation with Topsy Blocker plugin for WordPress.

-Dragon Blogger

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.