Abuse of Trackbacking

[Boogie]

Today I'm going to go into a little more details about how trackbacking works (if your script allows trackbacking) and the dos and donts of this procedure.

Lets take a look at my blog which allows trackbacking.

http://www.boogie-blog.com/worlds-be...rce-letter.htm

As you can see in the small 'meta data' table there is a url for 'trackback'

it looks like this:
http://www.boogie-blog.com/worlds-be...htm/trackback/

Now lets say I wanted to create a trackback.

At its heart, a trackback is an article that directly quotes your site and what you have to say about it, directly links to the article in which my site is mentioned. So for example we look at this post:

http://www.boogie-blog.com/madonna-nude-at-21.htm

We see that Big Ol Boobie's Blog has correctly trackbacked my site.

When we visit his article:
http://www.boogie-blog.com/madonna-nude-at-21.htm

We see that he has in fact LINKED to my original article that spawned his comments.

that is by and large the essence of trackbacking.

Now, what inspired this post is that several times in the past week or two I've recieved a trackback that did not include a mention of my site or a mention of my article, just simply a trackback hit that tried to get me to link back to their site for free.

Not a grand idea

The idea for trackbacking is to link to an article that inspired you, and in exchange get a free link/quote/mention on the site that did so. Its a link exchanging system.

Trying anything else is spam.


Now for the mechanics of _HOW_ to trackback that's up to your individual scripts. I know how to do it in Wordpress and its quite easy.

1) visit the site you want to trackback
2) find the article's trackback url
3) make sure wordpress options has set your post making area 'advanced' so you see the "put trackback urls here" line (if not goto options, writing, advanced)
4) supply the trackback url
5) wait for the owner of that blog to approve it

its that easy for wordpress.