What is a Trackback?


by Kian Ann Tan - Date: 2007-04-26 - Word Count: 391 Share This!

Before we go into the details about how a trackback works, it is important to adopt a mentality of a professional blogger, and part of this mentality and mindset is to view the blog not as just an instant publishing platform, but also as a platform for you to establish contact and build relationships and conversation with your target audience.

That in mind, professional bloggers should not only focus on churning out posts - but also focus on the social aspects of blogging. The blogosphere is a great place where you can find many like minded people round the globe, and together, communities of like minded people can bring discussions and insights to a new level.

Trackbacks and comments are the core elements that make up the social aspects of blogging. However, while commenting is obvious because there is a text box and submit button at the bottom of every post, trackbacks do need some explanation.

Trackbacks can be viewed as a "remote comment", and is a mechanism that works between blogs to tell each other "I'm quoting you".

Let use an example to make this clear.

Lets say John and Mary are both bloggers and one day John publishes an entry. Being an experienced blogger, John's post is controversial and he ends his post inviting for comments and opinions. Then Mary comes along and reads John's post.

Enticed by the topic, Mary then becomes eager to expand on the topic. She, however, decided that she has enough to say to make her comments into an interesting post! So she heads over to her blog and starts to fill in her opinions. She may even choose to quote a couple of sentences from John's post. Before publishing the post, Mary configures her blog platform to send a trackback to John's post trackback address.

When Mary clicks publish, what happens now is that an excerpt of Mary's post appears on John's post as a comment.

So, in this case, future readers of John's post will find in the comments section that Mary has expanded on the topic, and when they click on the link provided by the trackback, they will be brought over to Mary's post where she elaborates on her opinions on the topic.

Trackback addresses are normally published alongside blog posts. If the trackback address is not published, normally the trackback can be sent to the blog post's permalink address.


Related Tags: blog, blog marketing, blog promotion, trackback

Kian Ann is a professional blogger and blog marketing trainer based in Singapore, passionate about using blogs as a key start to Internet entrepreneurship, and helping businesses get maximum presence by getting started in corporate blogging. For more blog marketing tips and to get your free blog marketing e-course, check out his blog at http://www.blogopreneur.com

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