What is so Special About Trackbacks
August 19, 2010 by Joseph · 2 Comments
If you are a blogger, you have probably heard something about trackbacks. You may not know exactly what they are and what they have to do with your blog, but you have at least heard the name.
Whether you know anything about trackbacks or not, it’s okay. Most people don’t quite understand how trackbacks work and why they are useful for a blog. In this post we are going to discuss trackbacks — what they are, how they work, why they are important to blog traffic, and how to get more trackbacks. After you’ve read this, you’ll know practically everything there is to know about trackbacks and their relationship to traffic generation.
So, what are trackbacks?
The concept of trackbacks is a bit hard to explain. So we’ll use
an example to explain it in the best way possible.
OK, say you see a great blog post on another person’s blog and want to link to it on your blog. You could do this the old-fashioned way by manually putting a link on your site to that blog. However, if you do it this way, the person whose blog post you are linking to won’t know that you are linking to them unless you tell them.
This is where trackbacks come in. A trackback is a program which
will notify the owner of a blog when one of their posts has been
linked to at another blog.
How do they work?
A blog that has a trackback system set up will have a link at the bottom of every blog post. This link will say something like “Blog This!” Anyone who clicks the link can then put a link to that blog post on their site. The person who posted the original
blog will then be notified via email that their blog posting has been linked to. Additionally, the link that was clicked(“Blog This!”) will change to “Trackbacks”. From that point forward, the “Trackbacks” link will keep track of how many people have chosen to blog about that particular post. So after the first trackback, it will say “Trackbacks: 1”. The number of trackbacks recorded will be updated as they occur.
Why are trackbacks important to blog traffic?
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