Trackbacks Explained: Networking With Your Blog

Trackbacks are one of those blogging features that some beginners just don’t get (I was there - trackbacks have only made sense to me recently). The truth is that they are very simple to understand.

Think of trackbacks as comments that are posted by your blogging tool, rather than your own self-determination. To use a rather crude comparison, they are similar to video responses on YouTube. Someone makes a video. You think that you can add to that video. you make a video, and it shows up under the existing video.

Same concept with trackbacks. You find a blog post on someone’s blog that you think is interesting. You write about it on your blog, and leave a trackback in the process. The whole nine yards:

1. You read a blog post, and you like it.
2. You write a post on your blog about it. This could possibly be an “Aside” post.
3. While posting, you paste the address of the post you are commenting on in a special field on your post editing screen. With WordPress-powered blogs, the trackback address of posts will be the post address, followed by “trackback/” (ex. http://www.mysite.com/blog/2007/01/02/my-first-post/trackback/).
4. Upon the publishing of your post from your blog, their blog is notified by your blog, and a link to your new blog post is made on their blog.

To make this all fair, you should remember to include a link to their post in your post if your post is not specifically about their post, in which case you may not remember to leave a link. That way, the network between you and them is built, and you two have formed a “micro-relationship” of sorts.

You should also leave comments on blogs regularly, but that’s another topic. Following these tips will help you build your blogging future, giving your blog increased exposure. But remember the main rule for any Web site: Content is king.