Here’s a great reader question on how to do trackbacks:
I’m just learning about trackbacks, partly thanks to the great info you provide
here. Some sites say you can leave trackbacks, but there is no trackback url. If
I just use the url where I found the post as the trackback url, will this work
ok? If a separate trackback url is not needed, I wonder why they are used at
all? -Larry
Larry,
Some of my information on how to do a trackback dates back to when we had to use actual trackback urls that we got from the blog post we wanted to link to. They’d either have a link to their trackback url or they wouldn’t and that’s how we’d know whether they accepted trackbacks or not.
Nowadays all you have to do is link to the post you want a trackback from and most real blogging software will notify the owner that someone has linked to that post automatically.
The person you link to will get a notification of a comment, even though you merely linked to their post, and when they log into their blog they will see that you linked to them, from where, and a snippet from your blog post in which you linked to them.
They can then moderate it just like a regular comment on their site and it will show up as a trackback, usually separate from regular comments, and with the title of your post (think keywords!) as the link back to the post you made.
Pro bloggers don’t go looking for trackback links anymore, nor do they use the trackback url field provided by Wordpress and others in the post editor. All you have to do nowadays is link to posts you like and, whether they accept trackbacks or not, you are providing your readers with something good to click on, presumably.
Today I don’t even check to see if I get a link back or not. With natural out-linking to other great posts from other bloggers you will earn many trackbacks in a year’s time.
It’s more of a passive thing these days than before, where we were forced to do a lot of work just to make sure a trackback was registered with other blogs.
Thanks for the great question!
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Yeah, I agree. Trackbacks aren’t really needed any more.
Trackback: I think it goes something like this( &tag=”tb” ) at the end of your comment or link.
Thanks for the explanation on trackbacks. It is an area that I have been a little grey on until now. I now have it in perspecitve.