Well known PR blogger Steve Rubel has called out another well known PR blogger and writer for WebProNews and AllBusiness Jeremy Pepper over Pepper’s use of trackback spam in an attempt to drive additional traffic to his blog.
Writes Rubel:
“Jeremy Pepper trackbacked me today, but I am not letting his trackback go live on my blog. A trackback is a continuation of a dialogue, not a traffic-building gimmick. In Jeremy’s case, he was trackbacking one of my posts from today by updating one that he wrote five months ago…this tactic is bordering on trackback spam.”
I’m with Rubel on this one but I differ on one point: its not bordering on being trackback spam because IT IS TRACKBACK SPAM. Whether Pepper’s intentions were to drive traffic to his blog or to improve his Google juice is not clear but either way when your sending a trackback to a site you should be referencing that post today. If your looking to add to the conversation write a comment, don’t trackback a 5 month old post.
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Well said – had similar happen to me a couple of times (isolated incidents thankfully) and my polite request for the person to desist were met with the argument that “that’s what trackbacks are for, to let people know I posted something new”.
Cue rolled eyes, and silent acceptance that there is always “one out there”.
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I suppose you meant conversation vs. conservation :-)
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Be nice, its been a long day :-p thanks though, fixed now
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Actually it wasn’t to drive traffic, or Google juice, or any other conspiracy theories you would like. But, hell, I’m not a slave to my traffic numbers like others. I blog for the purity of blogging, not for numbers – you haven’t read any posts on my blogs about the number of links I have, or some such nonsense.
Aren’t blogs supposed to further the conversation? The issue of CS and PR had been written about before, he wrote about it five months later because of Jarvis/Dell, and I trackbacked to the CS post. I could have added a comment, but just went to Haloscan instead.
But, hey, it’s not a PR blog anymore. So, it’s a moot point.
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Actually you’d think traffic would work both ways: The intra-connectedness of web sites, I mean, that’s the point. Imagine this shizzy as a pomo narrative. It works both ways. Anyway, that other dude, not you Pepper, seems like a complete spaz.
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” If your looking to add to the conversation write a comment, don’t trackback a 5 month old post.”
Yeah, I go with that comment. “Furthering the conversation” means conversing. Heck, even a trackback to a post that said “I was writing about this 5 months ago, and things haven’t changed much”, and linked to that old post would have more relevence to the conversation.
I go back and forth – if I’m doing a trackback, it’s usually for a longer post or digression on the topic, comments are for quick responses.
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If pepper dude wrote about something 5 months ago, and the spaz writes a similiar thing 5 months later, shouldn’t spaz have linked the pepper dude? i mean, pepper dude is just saying hey.. i wrote about this here, and letting spaz and spaz’s readers know that there’s another resource, if they’re interested in whatever (and to be clear i don’t know who reads PR blogs to begin with???).. i mean these guys apparently read each other’s blogs? it isn’t like spaz was like, “who dis pepper dude?” Also, if spaz does PR, isn’t this like bad PR?
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Swashbookler and Pepper have a point. The Rubel blog has a tendency to tackle old topics and make them sound like it’s something new. If Pepper wrote about the same thing five months ago, it’s appropriate to point it out via trackback, comment or whatever way floats his boat. Either way, it certainly isn’t spam.