The art and practice of Trackback

Posted on December 4, 2007 | 735 views
Filed Under Blogging, Technology | Leave a Comment

Blogs are dynamic. The beauty of blogging is in its ability of two way communication. A reader coming to a blog can leave his comment and can get the response from the writer of the post in no time. It is this quality of blogging that has made even corporate world to indulge in maintaining blogs as a public relations platform.

The story of blogging does not end with comments by the blog readers; the trackback system of blogs takes this two way communication to a newer level and depth. In layman language, trackback may be defined as a method through which blogs communicate with each other in their sphere. Hence, a term blogsphere is in vogue to mark this affiliation of blogs.

Tracking back a URL is a unique method that has provided an easy to use system of acknowledging some post referred by the blogger while writing. Say for instance, the other day I wrote a post about Facebook’s beacon technology. In course of my homework for writing this post, I visited several other blogs that provided me useful information. I picked their point of view and reproduced it in my post with reference to their original write ups. It is here the trackbacks come in play, through tracking back the URL of original post; I will let the post writer know that I have borrowed some content from his work.

Trackback facility is a unique way of saying thanks to those who use to help you out by providing you the required material. Moreover, linking to other blogs wins you some traffic as well. I have been using trackbacks to my advantage not only as a useful way of acknowledging bloggers around but for my bloggers centric Public relations drive as well. It does not mean that every other post on your blog start carrying hundreds of links since there is a very fine line between trackbacks and spam. If you will start putting a lot of links in your posts, you will loose your search engine popularity because the spiders sent by search engines that crawl your blog will take it adversely and your search engine ranking will go down, consequently less traffic in term of search engine referrals.

Having focused the importance of this trackback system, lets get to some must know information about it now. In order to trackback successfully, it is required that the trackbacks are enabled on your platform as well as on the blog of the one, whom you are trying to ping. Mostly, it is enabled by default but in cases where it is not, one need to do it manually. Apart from this, most of the blog platforms use to send trackbacks automatically but for few it is to be done manually and for that matter a separate place is specified where you can add the URLs for manual trackbacks.

Today, you will find thousands of blogs around talking about almost everything on the face of earth and even in skies. This has given a new out look to the cyber world with its influence in real world too. To many, blogging by now is a passion and a tool to online social networking. If you are one of those, who are interested in networking, you must consider using trackbacks to let the fellow bloggers know that you are following them. I can bet, it will offer you many good friends. I wish you happy blogging!

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