BlogYou’ve Got Trackbacks
In case you’re not a blogger, you probably don’t know what trackbacks are. Essentially, they allow bloggers to link to pages where they are getting news. The original news source (that would be us) then keeps track of the sites that are linking to a particular article.
The benefits here are enormous when implemented properly. We get to gauge popularity of articles based on how many blogs are tracking back to us, and we also then pass that data on to search engines. Search engines then see the “blog response” to our news, and so the bloggers gain more credibility with search engines.
If you are a blogger, you may have noticed that we’ve been turning trackback support on and off over the past few weeks. The main problem with rolling it out has been spam. We’d get hammered with thousands of spam trackbacks a day when enabled… spam sites would try to claim they were tracking back to our articles in order to gain credit on the search engines.
We’ve put a stop to (almost all) of that, by tweaking and updating software. Trackbacks are on, and hopefully here to stay. If you’re a blogger, hopefully you know how to trackback, if not, check with the software that powers your blog. You’ll find our trackback initiating link right above the comments form on each news article.
