So, how does a trackback work?

[walrus]

Originally Posted by Bill

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.

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]

Originally Posted by Bill

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?

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.

Originally Posted by Bill

Does nofollow and dofollow have any affect on this?

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.