I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this because I have about four seconds to get in the shower and head to the office, but it occurs to me that trackbacks are becoming useless.
As you may or may not know, trackbacks are a feature of some (most?) blogging platforms. When you link to somebody else’s blog, your blogging software can send a message to his blogging software. Depending on your his blogging software is set up, his blog may or may not post a link back to your site automatically.
This blog is modestly popular and not infrequently linked, and I can’t remember the last time I got a legitimate trackback. They’re all junk now, trackbacks coming in at strange hours of the night from sites like 1800freeringtonesforeverybodyincludingyou.com.
Do people still use trackbacks? Have they fallen out of vogue because they’re rarely automatic and a pretty significant pain to invoke manually?
I’m thinking about disabling them on this site, and removing them from the checklist of features I include on new sites I build.
Comments
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Pretty much everyone uses Technorati anymore to track legitimate links. Check out the WordPress dashboard for an example. Probably relatively easy to drop into an existing site.
Mike W.
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007, 8:37 am
I’ve never been enamored with trackbacks and to this day don’t understand the real benefit. I don’t see it as having any value to the typical user.
Andy G.
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007, 9:54 am
In the Dave Winer glory days, people invented (whether it was him or not I neither know nor care) all these “trackback” and “pingback” mechanisms as a method of posting a link to people who were linking you really as a way of juicing search results. There are a bunch of other excuses for the phenomenon, but they’re really just a load of guano. It’s “mutual admiration society” stuff, which is fine if that’s what you’re in to.
Anybody who really just wants to know what is linked to them can do a simple search.
Mad William Flint
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007, 10:19 am
You’ve got two trackbacks on this article
http://theshapeofdays.com/2007/02/an_extremely_short_post_on_the_1.html
Seth
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007, 10:44 am
Trackbacks are essential and invaluable. In many respects, I’d rather have a trackback than a comment.
A trackback says “someone’s talking about you”. It connects your blog to another blog, building the dynamic energy of links in the true definition of the web.
It isn’t about “link juice” or popularity contests. People can add all the judgments they want to trackbacks, but that is all they do. Alert you that someone has posted your blog post in their blog. Whether or not they are saying something isn’t part of their job description. They just say “you have been mentioned”.
A trackback is much like a reference in a research paper or doctoral thesis. It is credit. And it is nice that it happens automatically.
Trackbacks help to alert you to possible splogs and copyright violations. If you include a link back to your blog and blog posts in your post, if it gets scraped by feed scrapers, you will get a trackback that alerts you to their illegal use of your content.
Not many people still use Technorati for the end all and be all of their research or monitoring world. They are too busy Twittering. ;-)
If you haven’t gotten a legitimate trackback in ages, then consider what and how you write. Maybe you haven’t written anything lately worth linking to and discussing off your blog? I don’t know. There is certainly a lot of competition for links now. But I’d look at that first before slamming an incredibly powerful tool in the blogging and web world.
Lorelle
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007, 11:58 am
Well, your trackbacks don’t display on your home page, that’s why. Nor does your comments count. I didn’t even know you had enabled comments on any posts again…I just happened to click this one to see what in the world you were takling about with the trackbacks.
Me, I like ‘em.
See-Dubya
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007, 12:03 pm
I think Lorelle’s opinion of trackbacks is stuck in 2003.
When I had incoming trackbacks enabled, I literally spent an hour every morning cleaning the crap up off my blog and out of my inbox that had accumulated overnight. Even when I turned them off in the interface, spammers still found ways to abuse the system, so I finally had to delete the trackback script itself from the server to get any peace. And not just on my personal blog- my professional blog, frequently linked to and talked about in its niche- because Trackback wasn’t giving me anything I couldn’t get from a combination of other tools that had the advantage of not covering my blog in ads for hentai and online poker.
And of course no one relies just on Technorati- they also use referrer logs, Google tools, web stats packages, del.icio.us, etc. to track who is saying what about whom. But Trackback/Pingback is a broken tool. It hasn’t been “incredibly powerful” in years. For every legitimate trackback I was getting (and there were quite a few), I was getting easily 200 spam ones. Not an effective use of my time, and certainly not an efficient way of telling me where I was getting linked from.
Tiffany
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007, 12:30 pm
Irony of ironies, I just sent a trackback to you and it did not go through.
The technology has always been a bit haphazard, which does affect their utility.
See-Dubya
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007, 1:59 pm
I use trackbacks and love them. I read my trackbacks and check out their source, too.
But, then again, I’ve got WordPress and use several spam filters, including Askimet, so most of my trackback spam never makes it to the blog and I only have to press one button to delete it.
Venomous Kate
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007, 3:35 pm
Yeah…every once in awhile I send a trackback to my Jeffypoo as a measure of appreciation, and they’ve never gone through. Well, I think on the old green-themed website they worked, but not since this one was designed.
I’d like this website’s design better if the comments were displayed as a count and the latest comments were placed on the sidebar…most of the fun in blogs are in the comments.
It used to be proper blog etiquette to have a trackback, but now it’s just as proper to have a plain ‘ol link or a ‘hat-tip’. Trackbacks, as I see it, are only useful if I’m a small blogger (which I am) and I write something important based on a big blogger’s article. I then increase the chances that the big blogger will read my post. Trackbacks also used to be important for the TTLB ecosystem, but that’s now redesigned too and less people care about that.
Feisty
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007, 10:21 pm
We’ve intentionally not coded a trackback mechanism into Habari because the protocol is blatantly open to spam. There’s really no reason to leave trackbacks enabled on your site without a specific reason. They’re cumbersome for legitimate users to create (compared to other tools, like pingbacks) and simple for malefactors to exploit.
If you’re using WordPress, you should still have access to pingbacks. They’re harder (though not impossible) to forge, and actually more useful, since they contain the excerpt of the remote post that links to you. From the viewpoint of pingback generation, they’re easier than trackbacks, too. You need only create a regular outgoing link to cause WordPress to check if the destination site accepts pingbacks, and if so, send them.
Owen
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007, 9:20 am