Since I started blogging about a year ago, I’ve heard quite a bit about trackbacks and pingbacks. I’ve only partially paid attention, given that I’ve been so busy promoting my freelance design and trying to make my blog successful. What I failed to realize, until now, is that tracksbacks and pingbacks are a huge part of a successful blog!
Just as I was thinking I better figure the whole thing out, this very timely blog post 5 Things You Need to Know About Trackbacks from Site Sketch 101 appears in my inbox! Weird how that happens.
Wordpress’ definition of a trackback is this:
“Trackback helps you to notify another author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog, even if you don’t have an explicit link to his article. This improves the chances of the other author sitting up and noticing that you gave him credit for something, or that you improved upon something he wrote, or something similar. With pingback and trackback, blogs are interconnected. Think of them as the equivalents of acknowledgements and references at the end of an academic paper, or a chapter in a textbook.”
In an effort to learn more about how they work, I started surfing, and instead of reinventing the wheel and writing about it myself, which I’m just far too lazy to do this morning after a 3-day weekend, I thought I’d just post a few links to other articles and blog posts which explain them both.
- WordPress Trackback Tutorial – An older post, but still valid and very informative.
- What is a Blog Trackback?
- Blog Marketing With Trackbacks – A great video that explains the whole process!
Have you found other trackback blog posts that we need to know about? Post them here and share the bloggy love!
i see what you did there
Hey Theresa, many thanks for this.I have been concentrating on a couple of WordPress blogs that I have built without really thinking about trackbacks and pingbacks – like you I only “partially paid attention” there was just too much else to do. So thanks for the succinct summary and compiling this excellent source of information. It should keep me busy for a while today…!