Trackback in Blogging
Trackback is a blogging term. It is a functionality that allows you to easily contribute and respond to feedback from around the blog community.
For example, when you are reading another persons blog site, you might have read a particular entry that you found interesting enough to leave a comment. Generally you would leave your thoughts in that blog’s comments field. While this is a great way to contribute it does deprive your own blog of content. You may be inspired from the blog entry to write something slightly different or more thorough.
So instead of leaving a detailed and potentially long comment you can write your own blog entry in your own blog and create a special link which would be a trackback to the original blog entry from where you were inspired. Usually you could put in a simple URL to the original blog entry, But the problem with this method is that the original blog entry doesn’t get to know or promote your new post.
To create the trackback you must find the trackback URL that the site promotes for that entry. This is found underneath the entry in the comments section. Using that URL you paste into the trackback field in the blog entry page. When you publish your new blog entry, the originating site will be automatically alerted that will then list your blog entry with the other comments. Thus you have now created a link between your two blog entries. It is just like comments, when someone trackbacks to one of your entries it will show up on your entries page next to the appropriate entry. If you click on this it will take you to a page that displays the title URI and excerpt from their entry.
This kind of remote commenting allows for greater detail without losing the readers.
Your own blog entries have trackbacks already enabled for others to remotely comment. When someone trackbacks to your blog their details will be listed under your own blog comments. A small title and the URL will be displayed that allows your readers to click to read more.
Trackback is supported by many blog sites and it is a great way for you to comment around the blog world while retaining your own identity and many links back to your blog.
Ryan said,
December 29, 2006 @ 9:27 am
One of the major advantage of using trackback is they can be used as a discussion board, between different Websites communicating on a similar interests and resources only the the problem of using trackbacks is that they are extremely vulnerable to spam. We don’t have real solution to overcome spams.
For applying trackback it is not necessary for the both sites to be physically linked with each other.
Robert said,
December 29, 2006 @ 9:43 pm
A good explanation of tracebacks, but could I make two suggestions to allow people to pick it up faster. One is to post a simple diagram (e.g. just handdraw, scan in and post) of the relationships between the two blogs. The other is to provide a specific example (e.g. using your blog and another) that people can look at. No fault with your explanation, just that some people are more visual or more hands-on and respond better to that.
UK Hosting said,
January 2, 2007 @ 9:28 am
I find trackback extremely vulnerable to spam and presently there no real solutions to combat this problem.