Barrie,

I'd never paid much attention to trackbacks, having only ever seen a handful at most on the majority of my lenses.  Then I read this post earlier this AM and decided to go seriously hunting through my lens stats.  I've now found one or two of my lenses that really have significant trackback numbers.

Here's the best explanation of Trackbacks that I have found.  According to it, it's links coming from Movable Type blogs, but not Blogger.  Obviously, we are just getting a total aggregate from Squidoo and no actual URL info.

Oh Gil - You SO burst my bubble! Spam huh - bummer. Well - I'm enjoying the single digit lensrank while I have it!

Same question - my one Squidoo's Most Profitable has 28 -- why would that be spammed?

Nothing stops the spammers. They waste their time and they waste ours too.

I have a comment form on my website, and of course I get spam comments from idjits not realising that I upload all comments manually. So I put up a security word and filtered all comments that don't include it into Trash. Problem sorted on my end, but when I empty my trash I see just how many people are still wasting time spamming my forms.

I just grin evilly and hope that the greater percentage of those are real spammers wasting real time and not some robot generating random posts.

(And if a legitimate commenter can't be bothered to use the security word that's not my problem. I don't have time to babysit people.)

My comment or Gil's?

I think both of us are trying to say that spammers send a lot of stuff out across the board - it works for some sites, so they do the same thing everywhere in the hope that it may work elsewhere. Spamming blogs has worked in the past - they may not realise that Squidoo is not a blog, they may not care, it may be a robot set up to keep spamming regardless. Something about your topic, perhaps, has attracted them to your lens and they're working their system.

I'm really just guessing, since I'm not a spammer , nor am I very technical.

Are trackbacks supported in the other direction? I.e. if I add a trackback URI to my Link List, will my lens appear on their blog? It would be really nice if this did work.