Nongeek perspective

In my previous article about promoting blogs using comments I recommended using TrackBack as an alternative to comments. However, I've been checking the blogs of some of my commenters and realize that many of them seems to be new to blogging (since their blogs have few posts) and after talking with some friends who didn't know about TrackBack I decided to write this little article about the subject.

TrackBack

TrackBack is a mechanism that lets you notify someone that you have written an article in your blog linking to (or commenting on) some post in their blog. Its like sending an email to the original author but, instead of a real email, you send a TrackBack "ping" using some TrackBack tool if your blogging tool does not support the protocol. The blog you're pinging to generally will display an excerpt of your post and a link to it.

You need to know the "TrackBack URL" which usually is displayed along every entry and it's unique for each post. So, if you want to ping some blog just:

1. Look for the TrackBack URL for the specific post you want to comment on, usually displayed at the end of the article.
2. If your blogging tool has support for TrackBack, enter the URL in it when publishing your post. If your blogging tool doesn't support TrackBack use a third party tool after publishing your post.
3. That's all! Pretty easy. Remember that you may ping several blogs at the same time.
   

Here are some free on line tools allowing you to send TrackBack pings:

• Simpletracks
• Trackback wizard
• Haloscan (requires registration). Let's you receive TrackBack too.
  

Backlinks, the Blogger.com style

Blogger does not support TrackBack but it has backlinks, which is pretty much similar. Backlinks are just a list of blogs linking to your post produced by Google blog search. So, if you're linking to a post hosted in blogspot you have nothing to do. When Google indexes your article the link will be automatically added to the original post.

However, the author of the blog you’re linking to must enable backlinks and, while TrackBack is a two-way communication system, backlinks doesn't allow you to ping a post in someone else's blog. That's why many bloggers using Blogger.com service (like me) use a third party TrackBack service along with backlinks.

Useful links

Additional to the links in the text, you may find useful information on these articles:

• What’s a Trackback? Permalink? Post slug? Ping?
• Haloscan Trackback: What? Why? How?
  

I hope you find this information useful. This post may be the first on a blogging basics series. Or perhaps it may be the last. I'm open to your comments and suggestions.

Technorati tags: blog, blogging, blogging basics, tools, promotion, blog promotion
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