Dave, I’ve been looking at a lot of different weblogs in the last few weeks and notice that while some list “Trackback” or “Pingback” right on their index page, others have that information on individual entry pages, and yet others seem to have either hidden or completely removed trackbacks altogether. What are trackbacks and “trackback pings” and why would I want them on my blog?
Trackbacks — also known as pingbacks in some blogging applications — started out as an ingenious method of having two different Weblog articles cross-reference each other automatically. It’s best explained by example. Say you’d written an article on your site about trackbacks. I could point to it here on my Weblog with an explicit link, then people who read my article could ostensibly click through and read your piece too. If someone started out at your site, however, they’d never know that I also wrote about the same topic and that I had linked to your article.
So what if when I submitted my article to my Weblog management system (Movable Type, in this case) it automatically notified your Weblog that I’d included a link to your article within my own? That’s useful because you definitely want to know what people say when they respond to you and link to your article.
The next level of sophistication, though, is for your Weblog management system to automatically include a pointer to my article at the end of your own article, so that people who start out on your site know that I’ve written a response or reaction to your article on my site too. Smart and sophisticated, a real proof of the dynamic and fluid nature of information publishing in the 21st century, right?
And yet you can’t trust trackbacks because software doesn’t differentiate between your legitimate weblog article linking to my own and a spammer sneaking in more inbound links to their site with spoofed trackback pings. I kid you not. In fact, just this weekend I got a trackback ping on one of my other weblogs that looks legit, but isn’t:
prom and homecoming dresses Excerpt: That sounds basically right. What do I know though, i run a silly designer prom dress site. Weblog: Prom Dress Patty Tracked: January 16, 2005 01:23 PM
If you were click through to the site link (which I haven’t included because this person doesn’t deserve the link) you’d find that it actually points to the home page of a cheesy ecommerce site and there’s not only no article, there’s not even a weblog involved.
You can read this and see it’s obviously a bogus link (the fact that it has nothing to do with the article it’s “trackbacking” is a pretty overt clue), but my Weblog system dutifully added it to the trackback links page and gave these losers a new inbound link from a popular, high PageRank site. At least, until I deleted it.
The other issue with trackback pings is the same one that plagues Web sites with little counters on the bottom of the page. Don’t you think about the site differently when you see “You’re visitor 36” than if you see “You’re visitor 137597” at the bottom? Of course you do, because more links, more comments, more trackbacks are all an indication of popularity, and popularity piques public interest in a circular sort of way. So some sites play down the trackback links because, well, they just don’t want to say “no-one responded to this article in the entire blogosphere”, “no-one responded to this one either”, etc etc.
That should tell you why these trackback links appear in various spots — if at all — on different weblogs. With many weblog tools the author has control over where or if it appears, but with others it s stuck and you just have to hope that you can delete the trackback spam before one bogus one attracts a herd of others and subsumes your thoughts and earnest writing completely.
As an ironic post-script, I actually just turned off the trackback feature completely on the blog in question, because I’m not using it much anyway, and, well, it never got into the public eye and never saw many legitimate trackback pings anyway.
Hi Dave
Very well written and informative article. More bloggers need to be educated in the harm and hurt they do to theirs and other blogger’s sites by implementing trackbacks, pingbacks, or any other form of link building the wrong way. Again, Tx for the great article on link marketing.
Hi dave,
i prefer trackabck as it increases my backlink,so it increases my search engine visibility.
By the way it also gives me an advantage on pagerank too.
Leo, you can add trackbacks by going into the configuration backend of your blogging tool. Most of them seem to disable it by default nowadays because of the spammers.
Ayush, no, probably not. Trackbacks are good for having other people know about your article, but I doubt they’ll help you with Google PageRank.
Will trackbacks improve my blog PR etc?
Hi,
I’m a new to blogging I have a trial blog Book Sale 101
(I hope you don’t mind me adding the link)
I find your article useful but how do add trackback to my blog? can I do it? plus how do i know if this is movable type or not. Thank you.
Hi Dave, I’m also a total n00b when it comes to internet trackbacks, and I have a few questions.
My boss has a blog that she wants trackbacks for, and I’m not sure she totally understands what they even are. Am I correct in telling her that trackbacks are simply referencing another article/post from a different blog, with proper citation (i.e., giving a link to the original post you’re referencing)?
Say I visit a blog that deals with the same niche as my boss’s, and I leave a comment saying “[my boss] has something similar to say on this topic over at [her blog link], anyone interested in another opinion could check it out.” Is this a trackback for the boss?
How will my boss know when a certain trackback is successfully getting readers to HER blog?
OK, I think that’s everything. Please let me know! I don’t think my boss is a very patient woman.
Great Article Dave. I wasn’t aware of that. I use Thesis theme. It’s great for SEO purposes. I will ponder a bit on the whole issue. Thanks
Hi Dave, nice article! I have been keeping up with you for awhile now. I never really used trackbacks but I guess I’m going to venture into it now. With my site’s domain http://www.teachmeblogging.com being very popular I just never used any other sources for traffic. I will give this trackback thing a go though! Won’t hurt to have a little more traffic I guess!
Hi..i read about the trackback article, its cool, but i guess i messed up a bit. If I include a link of another blog post on my blog(say blogger.com) and I send a pingback to that blog then is it important that the person will trackback me or is it automated? Coz I am helping him in away but there is a possiblity that he might reject my pingback and wont trackback me.. Is there something wherein if i sent a pingback they will dierctly trackback me automatically??? i know im confused ..plz help..
Exactly right, Richard!
Dave, I enjoyed the article on trackbacks as I am trying to better understand how they work. It looks like if I link to an article from my site, I am automatically creating a trackback to my site on their site…if they have trackbacks turned-on. Is that correct?
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the insight. I was just about to activate trackbacks on my blog, so it looks like you saved me some headaches.
Hi,
I’m newbie in all this stuff, I still not understand completely, but I’ll try to use the trackback feature, I had just begin with a blog about ecology in spanish (my native language), I had tried several methods to show my blog to the world, and I think that the trackballs will help me to do the trick, Thanks Dave.
Hi there,
I hope this all makes sense, but I was just wondering if the search engines give any credence to or credit for the number of trackbacks and the different ip addresses that the trackbacks come from?
What would happen if you manually remove the actual link back to whoever the spam comes from and just leave the comment posted without any links?
Again I hope these are not very silly questions.
Cheers and thanks for your help.
Newbie.
Hi Dave
I cam across your wonderful blog when it was recommended by someone at Fuel My Blog. I’ll be dropping by regularly, I’m sure. Probably won’t be long before I’m buying you a cuppa, either!
Kind Regards
THJnr
Nice article Dave, ironically I wanted to trackback to this article in a small post I’m writing on my blog. I’ll just have to use the old fashioned link 🙂
Well, I have more than 5 blogs but never used trackbacks in any of my blogs. I think Trackbacks are is important sometimes but most of the time it’s not good having it because thare are a lot of spammer out there who abuses the trackbacks.
This is a good information for me… but I will try to make use of trackbacks on my blogs soon, just to try the trackbacks features.
1. You have to visit your blog in a certain way for mt to start counting.
2. But I usually review the trackbacks daily anyways, because I want to approve them as quick as possible. MT 3.2 is pretty good at identifying junk track backs.
However, Michael, suppose you forgot to check your blog one day, then isn’t it possible you might accidentally automatically delete a relevant, non-spam trackback link?
With mt 3.2 it is very easy to manage junk trackbacks, they are never posted and are deleted in a day if you don’t approve them.
Trackbacks?
These kind of trackbacks are still the only ones I understand. But I hear people use em, so one day I’ll figure it out. Until then, they are “enabled” on my entries if anyone ever creates a link to…
Trackbacks?
These kind of trackbacks are still the only ones I understand. But I hear people use em, so one day I’ll figure it out. Until then, they are “enabled” on my entries if anyone ever creates a link to…
Trackbacks?
These kind of trackbacks are still the only ones I understand. But I hear people use em, so one day I’ll figure it out. Until then, they are “enabled” on my entries if anyone ever creates a link to…
Trackbacks?
These kind of trackbacks are still the only ones I understand. But I hear people use em, so one day I’ll figure it out. Until then, they are “enabled” on my entries if anyone ever creates a link to…
Trackbacks?
These kind of trackbacks are still the only ones I understand. But I hear people use em, so one day I’ll figure it out. Until then, they are “enabled” on my entries if anyone ever creates a link to…
Trackbacks?
These kind of trackbacks are still the only ones I understand. But I hear people use em, so one day I’ll figure it out. Until then, they are “enabled” on my entries if anyone ever creates a link to…
Trackbacks?
These kind of trackbacks are still the only ones I understand. But I hear people use em, so one day I’ll figure it out. Until then, they are “enabled” on my entries if anyone ever creates a link to…
A very logical question, Mike, but you’re talking about two different kind of pings, confusingly enough. The pings that you send out are typically notification pings to blog search engines like Technorati, while the pings that you’d receive are guaranteed to be from either other bloggers or spammers trying to “game” the trackback system. So, yes, it’s quite logical to turn off trackback pings (e.g., incoming pings) while still using new article notification pings of your own.
Hi Dave,
I turned “allow pings” off on my site and from what you’ve said I’m guessing that will disallow any track backs from the bad people. On the other hand I posted my site info at Ping-o-matic to get some traffic. Have I created a conflict?
Mike Moore
http://www.AskMikeMoore.com
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What are weblog trackbacks and why should I include them on my blog?
Dave, I’ve been looking at a lot of different weblogs in the last few weeks and notice that while some list “Trackback” or “Pingback” right on their index page, others have that information on individual entry pages, and yet…