When it comes to explain Trackbacks, it’s an exercise that makes a great judge of the skill of any blogging expert, because they are hard to explicate. So here I go, and feel free to judge me

Basically, when you write a post about something on your blog, and one of your readers likes it, he would leave a comment telling his opinion..

Well, how about leaving a comment about your blog post in my blog ? Here where Trackbacks come in!

Let’s say I read something pretty nice on your blog and I write up a post on my blog: “Hey folks, you gotta check this out, here’s a quote from it and here’s the link to it.” And I link to that particular post on your blog. And I publish it.

Unbeknownst to most, your blog platform – whether it is WordPress or Movable Type or TypePad, scans all the links in a post each time a post is published. It finds my link to your post and then goes out to your blog and checks to see if your post is accepting TrackBacks. If so, my blog sends a little ping! to your blog as if to say, ‘Hey! Oussama’s talking about you over on his blog.’ and your blog answers the ping and says ‘Alright, I’ll make a note of it.’ And then your blog makes a little note on that particular post that in effect says, “Besides all these comments under this post, here’s someone talking about this post on their own site – and here’s the link to it.”

Like that, you and your readers can see not just what the commenters are saying about it on your blog but even what other bloggers are saying about.

TrackBack was first created by Ben and Mena Trott during the early days of Movable Type and has gradually been integrated into the features of most popular blog platforms. A similar technology is pingbacks which has the added security of checking to see if the pinging site actually exists.
You don’t have to know how TrackBacks work in order to use them, you can simply set a post to be able to receive trackbacks and set your blog to send them when you publish new posts. Your blog platform should do all the heavy lifting and email you when there are new TrackBacks – just like it does when there are new comments to a post.

One of the best parts about TrackBack is that it helped to increase your blog’s linked-ness and search engine ranking. With the introduction of the ‘no follow’ attribute, links in comments and TrackBacks are usually often not included in the calculation of your blog’s Google PageRank. I presume this applies to the other search engines as well. Still, the findability may not be in the search ranking – but links from other blogs is always a Good Thing.

Thanks for your attention.
- Oussama

By N2H