One of the lesser-used features of blogs are trackbacks, probably because they are not something that is easy to get your head around.

Trackbacks in simple terms are links. They are not like a regular links though, they are special in that they will send a comment to a site from your site, when used.  This works both ways, if someone writes about an article on your blog, and uses your trackback link then you will receive  a notice in your comments area showing text from the other persons post. It is a way for you to know that another person has referenced your article or post.

Ok, so that sounds good, but how do you find the ‘special link’ and what to you do with it?

Ok, let’s use an example. Go to the link http://newsletter.blizzardinternet.com and look at any of the articles on the site. Notice, that when you view the home page, or a category or archive page you are viewing an excerpt of the article, so to view the whole article you need to click on the title.

Ok, so I have clicked on the title and now I am at this page:
http://newsletter.blizzardinternet.com/blog-linking-is-different/2007/04/23/

If you scroll down to the comments area, you will see that just above the comments box, is a Trackback link. If you hover over the link and right click and choose properties, you will see that the Trackback link has the extension /trackback

This is the link you use in your post trackback area.

So now on Blizzard University (this article) I am going to insert the trackback link into the Trackback area of the editing screen. (You will see this just below the upload area and you might need to click on the small + to expand the window.)

Now when I publish this article a comment will be left on the Newsletter site, on the post I have referenced, with a short excerpt from this article and a ‘trackback link’ from there to this article.

An administrator will usually need to approve a trackback comment, but once they do that, I now have a link to my article posted on their site.

If you are like me, if I can see it in action it really helps me understand a little better how it works, so try it out on your own site, with a trackback to this post.  Write a test post on your blog and then use the trackback area to link it to this post.

Hint: the trackback link to this post is: http://www.blizzarduniversity.com/32/what-is-a-trackback/trackback/

In summary, Trackbacks are a way for you to interlink your blog with other blogs. A number of sites have turned off trackbacks because of spamming, but they really can work to help you with your link building and so we suggest that you keep them active on your site and be generous in using trackbacks in your article to similar articles and posts on other sites.

A word of caution though. You should be referencing the other persons article in someway on your site, with a link in the text. If not your trackback could be considered spam .

For more info on Link Building on your blog, take a look at the recent article by Mary Bowling on the Blizzard Newsletter site about using links in blogs.

Categories: Blogging.
Comments RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a comment, or trackback.