Are Bullets Killing Your Trackbacks?
If you’ve ever looked up information regarding how to improve the popularity of your blog, then you have surely heard that linking to good articles and leaving comments on the websites of other people is a great way to accomplish this! Hence, the wonder of trackbacks!
What are tackbacks? Well, if two blogs have trackbacks enabled, then when you link to an article on another blog, your post containing the link will show up in that articles comments! Usually only a snippet of text surrounding your link to the article will be shown. This is a great way to build up relations with other sites by both giving links and posting comments at the same time while in the process of writing content for your site!
From time to time, I like to write posts that I title, Web Dev Connection. Take a look at an example from June 14th or June 1st to get a better idea of what I am talking about. These articles link to other interesting articles I have recently read on other websites. The problem is, I have just noticed that none of the links are generating trackbacks in the comments of these other websites! So what to do…
Well, first of all, I know trackbacks are enabled on my website, so the question I needed to solve initially was whether the sites I was linking to also had trackbacks enabled. Just by reading their comments, I could see that they did since there were trackback comments to other websites. This was totally weird, so I had to dig further…
I then took a look at some of my other posts where my trackbacks did in fact work successfully and I came to a shocking conclusion. My Web Dev Connection posts placed all of the links within a bulletted list and none of them created trackbacks. All those trackbacks which I had created, were from links within paragraphs!
If blogging is a war of writers in the battle for traffic, I’ve just discovered that bullets are just as deadly in this war as any other… !
What does this teach us? Don’t just post links to other sites for the sake of it! Include the links within your content and write a little something about them. This will not only ensure that your trackback works successfully, but it will also make it more likely that the trackback generates traffic back to your site!
June 20th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
[...] June 20th, 2007 by Deceth Yesterday I wrote an article exploring the possibility of whether bullets were killing my trackbacks. I came to the conclusion that they were definitely guilty of the crime and that I should therefore [...]