mobilephotos

No photos this time.

Trackback in my own perspective — so that most would understand what the friggin stuff this is! So I did some reading and this post by Emily on how to use trackback really helps.

For me, a trackback is very much similar to setting a person on a cc list if you are writing an email: you want to let the person in the cc list know that you are talking about them. To do a trackback, instead of using email address in the cc, you will use the Trackback URI instead.

The trackback doesnt need to be in the same blog domain like zenoed.com (why would you?); of course, the whole purpose of trackback is to be able to tell people that you are talking about what they have written; anywhere .. as long as you know the trackback URI (given at the end of this post).

Linking to other websites, which will automatically be called trackback, means several things:

1. It shows appreciation and acknowledgment.

2. It indicates worthiness of the article linked.

3. It’s one way of expressing your reaction to another blogger’s articles.

4. It’s one way of getting comments. If you send trackbacks to other blogs, there’s a great possibility that the blogger will compliment you through commenting to your post.

5. It’s one way of building inbound links. Inbound links are used by search engines to rank web pages. Just as much as it’s a great help to bloggers, it also gives headaches to some. This feature has been a spam vector with some individuals abusing it. A trackback spam can affect the blogger attacked by it. It may “clog up” the server, which may lead to your site’s suspension. Your blog could be regarded as spam, too. It will also significantly affect your search engine rankings.

So how to prevent trackback spam? Try Spam Trackback Validator plugin.

This plugin works in two ways:

• It checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and
• It retrieves the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checks if the page contains a link to your blog.

Other trackback spam blocking methods:

• The Wordpress team recommends removing the wp-trackback.php but this might not be a good idea because it blocks all the legitimate trackbacks to your site. You won’t be informed on who links to your site.
• Removing any tagging plugin might work. Blogging platforms, like WordPress features automatic pinging which sends a note to tag services that you’ve updated your blog using your tags. However, removing your tagging plugin is not good for SEO.
• Use other plugin such as Spam Karma which automatically blocks spam bots from entering your blog.

Hope this helps.