Blogging

Traffic Through Trackbacks

So when I first started this blog, it took me almost 3 months to figure out what exactly a trackback was. And now, oddly enough, I have been asked three or four times in the past couple weeks to explain the concept and each time I forget to include something. So, I figured I would just explain the basics of what they are and how to use them by walking through the best example I have experienced in the time I have posted on this site: my post called “The Audio Exodus” from Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 about the changes in the music industry.

When I was writing the post, I got most of my information from a TechCrunch post about Madonna leaving her record label:

So in my writing of the post, of course I linked to the article with a hyperlink in my posts’ text:

And because I used their article and linked to it, I included a trackback to that article in the trackback bar at the bottom of my blog editor. Your form might look a bit different or be placed somewhere else; these screenshots are from the online admin interface for a self-hosted Wordpress site. Also, notice here the site is listed as ‘already pinged’ because I took this screenshot after I had already written the post:

This basically just lets the address you entered know that you used it for something (aka: you ‘ping’ the address) and typically your ping will show up somewhere after the article you linked to. Some sites mix the trackbacks in with the comments and others (like TechCrunch) list the trackbacks before the comments. Normally, all it does is show the title of your blog/post, like this one:

The above screenshot is still below the original article and still send traffic my way every once in awhile.

This was a post I wrote in about 10 minutes or less before I went to bed that night and had no intention of really putting a lot of effort into and it was just because I included a trackback when creating the post that I now regret not really putting some work into it! See, my blog is no Engadget but I get a couple dozen hits a day or so from various sources so it doesn’t take much uptick to get me a bit excited about my traffic. This post is the highest traffic post I have ever had with over a thousand pageviews since I posted it and about half of those came in the day or two right after it went up. But you can see that even just a few days ago I had a pageview come in from that site:

And you can see the huge spike in traffic that post got me in this partial graph of my site traffic (most traffic directly from TechCrunch and another site which linked to me via TechCrunch):

So you can see that trackbacks are really easy to use and can make a big difference in your site traffic. I didn’t include all the screenshots and this story to try and be impressive (because in the grand scheme of things,I am not even in the top 1,000,000 on technorati yet!) but I think it makes it easier to explain the potential benefits of trackbacks if you can see tangible results!

I hope this helps answer some questions people have along the lines of “What are trackbacks? How do I use them? and Why should I use them?” but if I left anything out or oversimplified soemthing, please let me know and I will update this post as needed.

(As a note: I am adding trackbacks to the original TechCrunch article again and also to my original post so you can see another example of what they look like on various sites)

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