What’s A Trackback?

June 8, 2008

In a nutshell it’s a type of linkback. It’s a process for bloggers to send a notification and demand for linkback once they write something in one of their documents that directs to other blogger content. Once a weblog author publishes a post, the other blogger receives a notification, and through moderation process can permit or refuse the trackback. They moderate it just like a regular comment. If they permit it, trackback will show in comment sector of their post, with linkback to the first blogger.

With WordPress it’s so easy to send demand for trackback. While you are adding a new post, under the text editor, in the sector for this purpose, just put the URL of the weblog you are pointing to. Like here on the image.

Trackbacks and traffic

This is the new way of link exchanging in blogosphere world. A trackback immediately lets other blog author know you just wrote something about them and linked to them. They can allow it and that way exchange link with you. Blogroll or any reciprocal linking is not more a value for search engines, but blogging is active system and many people will read that post and will be in situation to visit the link.

Actually, reciprocal linking is still giving some kind of value to Google if you exchange links with sites with content related to yours. For example, if your blog is about MySpace, exchanging links with someone which weblog is about football will not give you points at Google, but exchanging with weblog about Facebook will bring you points at Google.

I have already blogged about Zemanta, the tool that can be used for finding related articles and that way exchange links with authors. I think that the original purpose of Zemanta is to provide content for your posts (images and articles), but its better that you have original content for your post and try to use the tool in trackback purpose.<