Expanding your blog’s readership circle can be quite frustrating at times, especially when the success of your blog hinges on how many people you can effectively reach. There are a million different ways you can reach out to people, but the effectiveness of each tactic varies. One way you can help to effectively get your blog noticed is through trackbacks.

So What Are Trackbacks?

According to WordPress.com:
“Trackbacks are a way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress blogs they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks, no other action necessary.
Think of trackbacks as the equivalent of acknowledgements and references at the end of an academic paper or chapter in a text book.
To send a trackback, add the trackback URI from the other blog post to the Send Trackbacks module in your blog post before you publish it. A trackback URI from a WordPress blog will end with /trackback/.”

Why Should You Use Trackbacks?

If someone has a particularly thought-provoking or well-written blog post that you want to further write on or just expose your readers to, you can link up to that post via trackbacks. This will also notify the author of the post that you have linked to them, allowing them to find your blog with a little more ease than if you just commented in the comments section (especially if it’s a very successful blog).
Linking to other bloggers will not only encourage them to read your blog, but (assuming you have good content on your blog) also to link over to your blog in their posts thereby increasing your level of exposure.

You can also allow trackbacks on your own website to help let others know they are welcome to share your posts. WordPress also allows you to decide on every post whether you want to allow trackbacks or not, so if there is something you don’t necessarily want to share you can opt out of trackbacks for that particular post.
Be sure to use your trackbacks wisely though and don’t just link to people for the sake of linking, you don’t want other bloggers to consider your trackbacks to them spam. Using trackbacks is pretty simple and an easy technique to reach out to other bloggers and allow them to reach out to you. The blogging world is such a tight knit community that you’re sure to gain a few new blogging ‘friends’ in the process.

14 comments

  1. Admin

    Reply

    Good job! This was a nice straight forward explanation of trackbacks. Do you recommend any trackback tools?

  2. Gail Gardner

    Reply

    There is a serious problem that is negatively affecting trackbacks. Bloggers are using plugins that generate dozens of phony trackbacks. We need to immediately blacklist any blogger doing this and TELL THEM or soon all popular bloggers will end up deleting trackbacks from any blogger they don’t already know or blocking them altogether.

    I wrote about how to recognize these phoney trackbacks and am publishing a blacklist in my blog in the post I’ll put in CommentLuv.

  3. Christian Esperar

    Reply

    Is this also available in Blogspot? I think this is awesome to increase blog readership and to gain more traffic as well as audience.

  4. RoseAllen

    Reply

    I agree much on this since it will generate more opportunity for you to improve your craft and know how you stand.

  5. Megan Brown

    Reply

    Thats true as I personally like this very much and love to work with this as it really proves beneficial.

    Anyway thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge concern to this.

    • Grant

      Reply

      I agree, trackbacks are the one of the most powerful systems to understand the popularity of your post. you have written an average piece, and you feel that you have produced a gem, then these trackbacks can work as a reality check for you :)!

  6. Asim Jofa Collection

    Reply

    Your style is so unique compared to many other people thank you for sharing the info i found the details very helpful.

  7. Reply

    Trackbacks are a great way to link back to an article that you have read and getting a link back to that article. This is almost like doing link exchanges 🙂

    This also helps to build up your quality of backlinks and traffic, opening the doors for sales, more comments or guest bloggers.

    Thanks do this lovely post, Kate.

  8. Marketing Philosophy

    Reply

    Bloggers really appreciate it when someone else link to their blog or say few good words so trackbacks can also help a blogger connect with other bloggers and there is a big chance that other bloggers will mention their blogs…

    Kostas | Opportunities Planet

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