Option to run Linkbacks through Akismet

Here's a post I found from 16 months ago:

Originally Posted by Juan Muriente

Same topic being discussed in the private forums. The answer is no, not at this point for most vBSEO users... although we do currently get a lot of spam here @ vBSEO.com

We are monitoring this closely and already have several contingency plans. We plan on implementing Akismet soon for vBSEO as well.

Did anything ever come of this? I've started getting Linkbacks from splogs and having to manually blacklist them is becoming a pain.

That's right.

What kind of linkback spam are you getting with vBSEO 3.1? Pre-3.1 trackback spam was unbearable, vBSEO now does a remote IP address comparison to the host IP. This has proven great for spam reduction. In fact, nobody has reported trackback spam to be an issue after 3.1.

If you are getting spammy *pingbacks*, I have good news for you, the next vBSEO build will require all pingbacks to have sent *at least* one referral from the 'Pingback URL'. This method will get rid of those annoying pingbacks that are sent for the sole purpose of driving users to the page originating the pingback...

The premise is: if it doesn't send a single user, it most definitely is not a resource worth linking back to.

Re: Akismet
If we are able to control spam programatically, I don't see a reason for adding the Akismet layer at this point.

Originally Posted by Juan Muriente

If you are getting spammy *pingbacks*, I have good news for you, the next vBSEO build will require all pingbacks to have sent *at least* one referral from the 'Pingback URL'. This method will get rid of those annoying pingbacks that are sent for the sole purpose of driving users to the page originating the pingback...

Yeah, that's it. It's blogs that are ripping off my site's RSS feed or whatever with a post like "Viper007Bond made a cool post today: [a few words from the post]" and then a link.

However, honestly, I don't think the requirement for one referral will work in the long term. It's super easy to after sending a pingback to also send a referrer (open the page and send the header).

Akismet on the other hand relies on IP address, site domain name, content, etc. to flag the spam and is adaptive. It's a lot, lot harder to get around.