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February 2, 2006How To Send A Trackback Successfully
Today I was asked how to send a trackback successfully to another blog by blogger who has not used the technology, I wrote this post to describe how she can use trackbacks in her blog.
The best way for a blogger to alert another blogger that he has mentioned his work in a blog post is to use a trackback. Trackbacks send a notification to a blog that another blogger has written a post about their blog article. The company Six Apart, developer of the blog publishing system Moveable Type popularized the trackback mechanism according to this wikipedia article on trackbacks.
To send a trackback, a blogger has to copy and paste a trackback url from a blogger’s article into the ping field of a blog content management system. Once the blog post and trackback ping is published the blog content management system notifies a ping server that the page has been updated. The ping server then notifies the blogging system of the blog from the original trackback that a trackback has been sent from another blog. A trackback link will then appear underneath the post on the original blog.
There is an increasing amount of trackback Spam from malicious blog Spammers, and so many blogging publishing systems allow bloggers to monitor trackbacks before deciding whether to publish the trackback.
Search engines give higher rankings to those websites have more links from relevant websites. Trackback Spammers send trackbacks to attain more links in order to get higher rankings on search engines and receive direct traffic. The correct etiquette in using a trackback is to reference in your post a blog post where you wish to send a trackback. Commenting in your own blog article about a blog article on another blog where you wish to send a trackback will increase the likelihood that a blogger will publish a trackback on their blog.
Successful trackbacks like successful blog marketing can only be achieved if a blogger understands that he is having a dialogue with other bloggers. Merely targeting other blogs for links will not only get your trackback deleted but may also give you a reputation for Spamming amongst your industry’s community of bloggers. Don’t send a trackback unless you wanted to comment indirectly through a trackback on a blog post, or you wish to reference some information provided by a blogger’s article on his blog. Only send a trackback if your post is relevant to the other blogger’s article. Lastly, definitely do not randomly send trackbacks to a blogger’s article when your own article does not even reference their post, or has nothing to do with the content on another blogger’s blog.
Posted by johncass at February 2, 2006 12:53 AM
Trackback Pings
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