Blogging Tips

You may have noticed that you have comments waiting to be approved that look rather mysterious. I am not talking about the tons of viagra, cialis and porn spam every blog gets, I am talking about a trackback.

A trackback (or sometimes called pingback) is a method to allow to posts to reference each other. For example, if I write a post on my blog about Jane Smith’s article on blogging and include a link to her article in my post, a portion of my article and where it came from will be sent to Jane Smith’s comment section for her blogging post.

The problem with trackbacks is that spammers use them to. For instance, I received this trackback on another blog of mine:

John McCain | link here | IP: xx.xxx.xxx[…] McCain is not as conservative as everyone thinks […]
Jan 25, 9:07 AM

However, when I clicked on the link, I was taken to a site that had a lot of pictures, mostly unsavory ones, and then the actual post hidden in an obscure place on the site. Do not automatically approve trackbacks before checking out the sites. There is not much you can do if they do link to you, but you don’t have to give them a link back!

Comments

9 comments on “What are Trackbacks?”

turnip on January 30, 2008 at 10:58 pm wrote:
I used to just delete these until I figured out some of them were good.
Toni on February 2, 2008 at 6:58 am wrote:
I was going to setup pingbacks on LoveGirls but have always been hesitant to use, would you say it’s common for them to be used for spam or are they worth setting up?
Laice on February 2, 2008 at 8:33 am wrote:
Thanks for the tip! I approved one or two, I only checked them after I approved Were not unsavoury, of that I consider myself lucky.
Daily Celebrity Gossip on February 6, 2008 at 3:58 pm wrote:
Great blog post, keep it up
Xacur on February 6, 2008 at 10:20 pm wrote:
I have seen some blogs have a comment button and a trackback button, but the trackbacks are in the comments, I don’t understand why is that.
KiwiPulse on February 7, 2008 at 2:52 am wrote:
I receive these kind of trackback too, I’m moderating everything. But sometime I think that people that doing that just want us to click on their website to get traffic.
BlogZ on February 7, 2008 at 5:12 pm wrote:
Depending on your theme, trackback comments can be located with the comments are in a separate section after the comments.
eekins on February 15, 2008 at 4:52 pm wrote:
Interesting stuff. I’m still quite new to blogging and was meaning to look in to trackbacks and what they are used for etc.
banner rotation on March 30, 2008 at 8:12 pm wrote:
banner rotation…

This is a cool website….

turnip on January 30, 2008 at 10:58 pm wrote:

I used to just delete these until I figured out some of them were good.

Toni on February 2, 2008 at 6:58 am wrote:

I was going to setup pingbacks on LoveGirls but have always been hesitant to use, would you say it’s common for them to be used for spam or are they worth setting up?

Laice on February 2, 2008 at 8:33 am wrote:

Thanks for the tip! I approved one or two, I only checked them after I approved Were not unsavoury, of that I consider myself lucky.

Daily Celebrity Gossip on February 6, 2008 at 3:58 pm wrote:

Great blog post, keep it up

Xacur on February 6, 2008 at 10:20 pm wrote:

I have seen some blogs have a comment button and a trackback button, but the trackbacks are in the comments, I don’t understand why is that.

KiwiPulse on February 7, 2008 at 2:52 am wrote:

I receive these kind of trackback too, I’m moderating everything. But sometime I think that people that doing that just want us to click on their website to get traffic.