So, how does a trackback work?
 

Halfdeck was saying a trackback was a reciprocal link, and that a comment would be better.

Which doesn't fit my understanding, which doesn't mean much, because I don't really understand what a trackback is and how it's supposed to work.

If I copy a permalink, and put it in a post, is that a trackback?

Is a trackback by definition reciprocal?

Whats the difference between a trackback and a pingback?

I may not have been talking about a trackback at all. What I meant was placing a permalink to the interior page in the page body of a post on a blog.

Here's a page I found on this, I remain unenlightened...

http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/web...ckback-debate/

"For the sake of this article I’m going to classify three different methods of trackbacks:

Link and Trackback: This is the preferred trackback form of those upholding the etiquette argument. This is when a blogger links to the blog that he/she is sending the trackback too.

Non-Reciprocal Trackback: This is when a trackback is sent without a link to the blog receiving the trackback. This would probably be the must despised method of trackbacks but I tend to believe that it might be one of the best (under the right circumstances).

Two-Way Trackback: This is when Blog A sends a trackback to Blog B and Blog B sends a trackback to Blog A without a link in the article written to either site. Therefore, both sites have a link to each other without either one being linked inside the article. "

I used wordpress to do this, which automatically does the trackback ping for me as long as it knows the appropriate uri.

I write a post:

http://www.erotophoria.com/blog/2006...al-orgasm-day/

In the body of my post there is a link to a friend's (Simon) post:

http://www.xratedtv.com/xlog/2006/12...mber-22nd.html

Notice that Simon's post has a comment down below which quotes part of my post? This is a trackback. Anything more is too technical for me to understand. |loony|

Does this answer your question?

i never looked it up, just assumed it was a link back to my site from a site that used my post as a feed. Like a track back to where the post is from. I actually get tons of traffic from those things, the rss feed posting sites.

Only thing is, most trackbacks, in normal fashion, such as listed on another page like comments, most blogs put in a nofollow tag, so one way to me. Put in a post like Virgohippy's, is not really a true trackback and does'nt have nofollow.

Only thing trackbacks brought me was spam. Course there is a plugin for wordpress that checks for recip link.

Far as I know though, only person that gets anything out of it is the person getting the trackback.

I tried trading trackbacks with some other bloggers (with nofollow turned off). Basically I write a post commenting on something in your blog, and you do the same for me.

Seemed like a good idea but people couldn't keep it up. Findind something meaningful to say seemed too hard for most sex bloggers.

Unfortunately, wordpress seems to handle this differently with different versions.

If I quote you in a post and link to your post like Virgohippy's example, that should create a ping-back. Which is similar to a trackback other than it does not quote a segment of your text. It simply adds a link back to your post from their comments section.

If I quote you and I use your url (yoururl.com/post) and add /trackback (yoururl.com/trackback) that should create the trackback which takes a portion of your post and inserts that as a comment.

If you look in the comments section for the trackback link, when you mouse over the link, you'll find that the link does show the /trackback/ extension.

I know with my version, even though I have pingbacks allowed, I don't seem to do them and if you want to trackback to a post, you must use the /trackback/ on the url you post or the script wont process the trackback either.

As far as your article is concerned, as far as I am concerned the above is the only true trackback.

The second one he lists is spam.

The third is just reciprocal linking within a post.

Wow after reading this thread it is all as clear as mud.

Well, one thing is now clear to me.

I meant putting a one way permalink in a post body, and did not mean trackbacking.

That's the thing I was suggesting we do a bit more of, tho, as hony suggested, it will tend to be a bit of trouble, and we'll probably only do it sporadically.

But, it might help "vaccinate" our blogs from having only index-to-index links, and not having at least a few interior page to interior page links, making them look a tiny bit better to the various search engines.

As well as giving something slightly fun to our surfers to follow. Surfers like to explore.

I think it's interesting that virgohippy didn't put the /trackback/ at the end of the permalink, yet the linked blog treated it as a trackback. I've seen that too, and that's what I thought a trackback was.

Why did his usage work the way it did?

Does nofollow and dofollow have any affect on this?

By definition, that would create a ping-back which should still post a recipricol link. It just would only add the post title and URI into comments and not an excerpt from the post. To do what you want the person you are going to be linking to would need to turn off the "accept pings" for the post you were going to link to.

Also, what you describe above is why I've started creating seperate templates for categories. So that I can do category specific link exchanges.

[shameless spam]
It's also why I think a lot of bloggers are missing out by not submitting their post URI's to UW's Perve Space and my directory Niched Porn Blogs. Where else can you easily create individual links back to specific posts? (Besides the few aggregators that accept adult)
[/sameless spam]

I havent spent a lot of time verifying this but I believe it has to do with the version of WP being used at both ends. Like I know I use 2.01 and that if I just post the URI from one blog to another, no ping-back occurs but I can do trackback's by using the /trackback/ at the end of the post URI.

I've worked with others who wanted to do something similar to this and I found that accepting pings seemed to be a WP2.01 issue. Although I know the script sends the pings as I have had it work with non-WP scripts.

WP1.5x seems to be more forgiving than as to whether the /trackback/ is added or not to the URI.

But to give any type of definative answer, I'd need a much larger sampling.

Two different things the follow / don't follow is a comments issue and not a posts issue. You have to add rel="nofollow" inside a post if you want to do a nofollow on a link in a post.

Doesn't that imply that the best possible setting would be to turn off accepting pings in general?

What advantage would there be in accepting pings if all it does is create a reciprocal link?

I've been doing trials on a few of my splogs, and so far I haven't been able to recreate either a trackback or a pingback, wether or not I put /trackback/ after the permalink, while putting the permalink into the blog body text. Maybe I haven't waited long enough for the trackback to show up.

The critical question is, how does one create a oneway link from one blog post to another?

Is using dofollow, and making comments, with akismet turned on, the best way to accomplish this on most blogs?

Well, I did get a trackback to show up, after a hour+ wait, using the /trackback/ appended to the permalink url.

In mainstream, trackbacks and pings are probably the most common means of link exchange so it would be considered by them to be unethical.

If a group of adult bloggers decide they want to do some one way post linking, thats cool if everyone is in agreement but you would still risk pissing someone off who was not in the group but decided for some unknown reason to link to one of your posts.

Since thats a pretty remote possibility, probably not worth worrying about.

Give your spam filter a check as almost all trackbacks tend to get tossed in with the spam.

If your dealing with splogs, I don't see any problem with disabling either ping-backs or trackbacks.

So far, it looks like simply putting a permalink link in a post DOESN'T create a trackback or a pingback.

At least it hasn't after a days wait.

Here's a short test post, made yesterday, I'm using as one of several tests for this.

http://www.amateurpagexxx.com/heres-...ast-night.html

This seems to produce the oneway link I want, at least with wp 2+.

So, it looks like my original concept, that of creating one way interior links by placing permalinks in posts, would work. On blogs running wp2, at least.

I tried participating in a blog carnival for a while, which means I would have a blog post with links to 50+ other blogs, and them to me, and I did see some automated trackbacks working. But maybe only 10%.

Unless you do it explicitly it doesn't seem that reliable.

Okay, I'm looking for a couple of blogs that will volunteer to participate in a series of tests on comments.

It seems to me that commenting should produce a oneway link - except that it's a oneway link back to the commenter.

It's a "taking" oneway link.

Which is kinda the opposite of the original idea that I was playing with of, which was to place permalinks in blog posts _to_ each other - "giving" a one way link.

But I want to test it, so I need a couple of people to volunteer their blogs.

Here's the blogs I was gonna test this with:

http://www.analsextips.net/

and

http://www.4pornxxx.com/

which means I need blogs devoted to anal and webcam/lesbian/teen.

I leave a comment on your blogs, and you leave a comment on mine, and we look at the comments and see how the linking works out.

Any volunteers? Anybody else have different niches they want to try this on?

I recommend for now only leaving comments on pages like

analsextips.net/a-beautiful-pleasure-pain-anal-face.html

comments on pages like

analsextips.net/some-more-free-anal-pages-and-gallerys.html

will not pass much value. The cache won't be refreshed for months either so your comment will take forever to show up.

and when approving comments, allow live links not only in nicknames but within the comment itself - that way people can embed links inside a paragraph of text.

Too many interlinking between a handful of blogs can expose the entire network. If the "club" is small its no better than crosslinking with yourself.

Lastly, how do you plan to keep track of comments? If I spam your blog with "relevant" comments and you only leave one comment on my blog, then its not a fair trade

That's part of the reason that using comments as the vector for linking didn't occur or appeal to me at first - I'm used to "giving" links, which pretty much has to be done by hand, is fairly easy to check, and it's part of the older linking culture.

Leaving comments open has a few problems - for example, will "legitimate" partner comments get lost in akismet? Will people we don't want to link to, enter comments that we end up accepting?

Right now I just want to mess with it a bit and see how it works.

I figure the comment emails one gets will let us track it enough, for now at least. Like you said, we don't want to go wild with it.

I still mostly want to explore the idea of putting permalinks to other people's more unique blog posts in posts, to make oneway interior-to-interior page links.

I figure some trackbacking would be fine, but you were right, trackbacking isn't a method that would help much.

I can offer these two blogs to test with:

www . webcam-chat-sites.com
www . connectbycam.com/blog

If you trackback or comment on posts there I will approve them.

My preference is really if you would write posts on your site of the "I saw interesting post over at ..." type. That would mean a link to my site and the post you link to will automatically link back -- that's a fair two way trade.

Hi hony, thanks, I just tried one test comment (with one link) on your webcam-chat blog, it seemed to work as I expected.

Now, if you would be so kind as to go to my http://www.4pornxxx.com/ blog, pick a post, and make a comment.

I spcifically don't want to create a "two way" link between single pages, which is why I'm testing comments linking.

A two-way or reciprocal link is probably nearly useless as far as passing SE relevancy is concerned - certainly oneway links are what google is preferring these days.

Again, this is all just testing.

I want to test comments with two links in them, too.

Anybody else have any blogs they want to volunteer for comments testing? Almost any niche will do, we don't have to stick to the two niches I volunteered.

Sorry I misunderstood, I thought you were testing the technology of trackbacks.

Links in comments work technically without any difficulty I think - but I'm more interested in links within blog posts themselves. That's why I buy blog posts.

So am I - my original mental model, the one that led me to start this thread, was about placing one-way permalinks in the body of blog posts, with good anchor text in the link.

Thats the thing that I was thinking of when I suggested in the other thread, the one about "is there money in blogs", that we should do a kind of trackbacking club.

I was mistaken in my terminology. I don't want to do "trackbacking" (which automatically produces a reciprocal link), I want to find some linking partners to do permalinks within blog posts with.

Right now, tho, I'm just testing comments as a way to do a kind of oneway linking.

It will work, but it has a few problems.

Ok I understand now, I didn't read that other thread so missed the point.

I'm perfectly happy to do in-post links -- in fact you may start getting some as I told the writer assigned to connectbycam.com/blog that he should start checking your blogs. So when he sees something he finds interesting he is liable to blog about it. Feel free to reject the trackback, which will then cause the link to be oneway.

The other blog, webcam-chat-sites, does not currently have a writer assigned so nothing is happening there.

Here is a thought -- I would be happy to create a writer account on that blog and let you create posts on it, which naturally would link to your own blogs.

Up side for you is that you get links
Up side for me is that someone is posting to that blog

Let me know if you are interested. In fact, if you are interested just register at the site and let me know the username and I'll grant it writer privs.

BTW, if you think I'm a bit crazy here don't worry - that site is a sort of training ground where I put writers I've just hired so I'm not too worried about it. It does have PR, is indexed by Google and gets modest traffic -- and makes income too -- so it isn't just junk.