What is a Trackback?

Posted on January 15, 2008
Filed Under blogging |

Recently I’ve been trying to give some love to other people’s blogs that I visit. You’ll see links in my posts to different web sites, but when you like something written on a blog, the proper way to link to it is through a TrackBack.

If you look up TrackBack on Wiki it says:

“A Trackback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Movable Type and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of Linkback.”

Huh?

If I can just dumb it down a little so even I can understand it…

Basically a trackback is a link that you add to your blog posting, when you reference another person’s blog. It’s the polite way of giving some love to other bloggers and helps everybody in the process by creating backlinks. Did I mention that backlinks help you in the search engine rankings?

So, I just finished watching a video on Pat Marcello’s Blogging4Boomers membership site that talks about how to create a trackback. Now I get it!

By the way, when you write a post and create a trackback to the other blogger’s post, on their blog there is a small excerpt from your post included in the comments. That’s how you get some backlinking from their post!

I say all this to tell you to go check out this great video on Mike Paetzold’s post on WPTutorial.com. Mike created a video that shows you the steps you need to take before you start creating a blog.

The post is called: Profitable Blogging how to

If you click on that link, you’ll see the video that shows the steps Mike takes when deciding what topic to start a blog about. Mike has several blogs as you can see by the links in the sidebar. The man knows blogging and how to generate traffic from your blogs, so watch the video and learn.

Now, the backlink part of it… If Mike accepts my comment (trackback), then in the comments section of that post, you should see an excerpt from this post, which will link back to my blog (hence the term “backlink”)