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Is the trackback dead? Only if you're selfish?
2007 March 29
Steve Rubel thinks that trackbacks feel irrelevant!
These days, however, the TrackBack feels irrelevant. Sebastian Kiel agrees with me. So does Jeff Harrell. It’s been replaced by little widgets that have the same effect. You’ll notice that all of my posts have a chicklet that show the number of links and diggs. This is powered by Feedburner.
Jeff Harrell thinks trackbacks are becoming useless.
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.
Here’s the flaw in the thinking of folks who think that the widget and chicklet will kill the trackback!
Widgets and chicklets are selfish! By disabling trackbacks in favor of chicklets /widgets your forcing your user to take an extra step to see who else is involved in the conversation.
On my blog, when I receive a trackback, it appears in the top of the comments for each post and the user can quickly and easily see what other blogs are involved in the conversation. Why would I make my readers jump through hoops and force them to click through to other services in order to see if any other blogs are involved in the conversation.
Now, I’m not saying that chicklets or widgets are bad. I just fail to see the benefit behind forcing your users to click through to another site to see who’s linking in.
Okay, not everybody sends trackbacks (why not you fools?) and the external services do provide a means of seeing who is in the conversation but hasn’t sent a trackback.
Yes there can be an issue sometimes with trackback spam. But it’s not that big an issue! I receive over 1000 comment spams a day, and very few, if any lately have been trackback spam. Quite a few months ago I got hit by a lot of trackback spam, but it never made it onto the blog.
There are plenty of tools available to protect you site from comment and trackback spam.
I have sent trackbacks and pings to blogs only to find out that the blogger in question has disabled them.
These people are, selfish! They’ve robbing their readers of easy discovery of other bloggers with valid opinions on the same topic. They’re robbing their readers because they’re to lazy to install a few plugins and moderate their comments.
Some folks will say, that some of the reason for this is because they want to keep readers on their site and not have them click off to other blogs.
If so why would you employ chicklets/widgets on your blog?
As was looking at the comments on Steve and Jeff’s blogs I see that they both still have trackbacks enabled .
I also spotted this excellent comment by Lorelle on Jeff’s blog. I’m reproducing it here as I don’t seem to be able to link directly to the comment! (Actually I don’t think I can do that on this blog either! I’ll have to fix that!)
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.
As I read through the comments I’m forced to notice that many of the ones which agree that trackbacks are dead are heavily based in the “I”, such as this one by Tiffany!
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.
Comments such as the one written by Tiffany betray a mindset that makes me reluctant to visit her blog. (I have never read Tiffany’s blog, so I’m not commenting on the quality of her blog, simply the comment in question).
The comment shows a self-centric attitude only concerned with the author tracking what other people might be writing about her. It shows no regard, nor desire to have her readers involved in the larger conversation.
I believe that people enjoy blogs because they are a link centric information source. When I read an interesting post on a blog I usually read the comments as well. If there are trackbacks I sometimes follow them.
I never, repeat NEVER go to Technorati or any other service and perform a search to ascertain who’s linking to a particular post on somebody else’s blog.
My assumption is that if there’s no trackbacks and few or no comments then nobodies talking!
If the topic is actually important enough or interestin
g enough some one else will have written about and it will turn up in my feed reader. Unfortunately, I will probably miss many great posts related to the article and I don’t get to see trackbacks in my feed reader.
There’s also the issue that many bloggers are not inclined to link to blogs that have trackbacks disabled. But that’s a whole other post!
At the end of the day, if you disable trackbacks you’re not only being selfish, but robbing your readers of the broader conversation!
Here’s a question? Are bloggers who disable trackbacks (and/or comments) displaying a fear of possibly being contradicted or proven wrong before the eyes of their readers?
12 Responses
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Well done!
Trackbacks are a very important part of the blog conversation world. The fact that comment spammers use comments and trackbacks to spam should not mean that trackbacks should be treated differently from comments. They are all “comments”.
I’d also like to clarify a point I’m seeing on many blogs as they debate this issue for themselves. There are incoming and outgoing trackbacks.
Many blogging programs, including WordPress, have a feature to turn on and off trackbacks from the Write Post Panel and/or Options Panel. This does not turn off all trackbacks, it only turns off your blog’s ability to send trackbacks.
To stop the receipt of trackbacks involves changing the core programming manually or through a WordPress Plugin and changing the WordPress Theme that displays the received trackbacks.
Excellent coverage and thanks for bringing up this issue. I believe those shouting trackbacks are dead are certainly missing the whole picture. Trackbacks are still new and still being understood by bloggers. Their value is growing, not dying.
Minor self correction. I forgot that WordPress now allows turning off incoming receipt of trackbacks and pingbacks from the Options > Discussion panel.
No, I don’t think it’s a fear of being contradicted (after all, you’ve gone so far as to call me “selfish” in this post, and I assure you I won’t be losing sleep over it). After all, Technorati and other tools would show those things just as readily as Trackbacks would (it’s how I found you, after all). But what Technorati does NOT do is pour thousands of messages into my inbox each morning: “Please moderate trackback….” I have a fantastic anti-comment-spam plugin, but the assault on my wp-trackback.php on a daily basis was torrential. I could not maintain that if I had to spend time digging out of that level of trackback spam multiplied across the three blogs I participate in. Maybe you have that kind of time on your hands, but I surely don’t.
So yes, I suppose it IS selfish. I value my time very highly and prefer not to spend it on moderation-queue maintenance. I value keeping my database size reasonable so that legitimate content loads without getting bogged down by links to hentai and online gambling sites. And if it’s selfish to want to save literally hours of my time daily in exchange for interested readers having to make *one more click*, then yes, I embrace the term.
I have been blogging for 5 years now, across three different sites. And I’ve learned that if my readers care that much about being part of “the larger conversation,” they’re already using the superior tools- they’re subscribed to Technorati tag feeds, they’re clicking through to commenters’ sites, they’re using Google Blog Search and Blogdigger. The ones who are interested don’t need Trackback, and the ones who aren’t interested weren’t using it anyway. It’s the people who rely primarily on Trackback to participate in the conversation who will find themselves left out of it in the long run.
I’ll say it again. As long as Trackback can be abused by spammers, it will be an inferior, broken tool. I’d turn it back on in a heartbeat if someone could figure out how to fix it. In the meantime, I will absolutely not continue to allow my blog to be a free billboard for the scum of the Internet.
The thing about using services such as Technorati is that you’re forcing the user to take an extra step to beyond your site to see who is talking about your post. You may have found me, but it’s very doubtful that your readers will!
My readers however, will not just find you (because I linked) but also find Steven Hodson because of his trackback.
Do you expect me to believe that the majority of your readers go to Technorati and Google Blog search just to see who is linking to any posts you’ve written?
Hell I won’t even do that for my OWN posts, instead preferring rss searches for sites linking to my blog.
I’m only just beginning to work outy how to use trackback, and even then it doesn’t seem to work half the time.
The site looks great ! Thanks for all your help ( past, present and future !)
I have been trying to find out the code to display trackbacks or pingbacks to my blog for a while now. But I cannot seem to find one. I have tried a number of themes but none of them ever showed me any trackbacks or pingbacks. The Discussion Options are all enabled.
I do think, pingbacks and trackbacks are no dead – but are important to further a conversation.
CA, trackbacks and pings are supported by wordpress by default.
If they’re not displaying in your current them I’d suggest comparing the code of the comments section in Default WordPress theme and implementing it in your own.
But that really would only be displaying the trackback address to readers.
The trackback address is usually yourblog/postname/trackback/
In the WP discussion options make sure that “Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)” is enabled.
The “allow link notifications …” option is enabled. Actually, the trackback address does display. Only the pingbacks and trackbacks from other blogs to my blog does not get displayed in my comments section.
I’ll do what you suggest and look at the themes that display them and compare the code. Thanks.
“You just can’t get to there from here” – This was a comment made to me, years ago, by a farmer when I was lost and asked him for directions. That’s how I feel about pingbacks to my site. Here’s what I have as my pingback settings:
Options –> Discussion: Allow link notifications from other weblogs – checked; attempt to notify any weblogs linked to from the article – checked.
I had “Comment author must fill out name and email” checked earlier: but I unchecked it to test this pingback beast. I do have “comment author must have a previously approved comment” checked.
I checked the code on my site with the same code on the theme developers website and a few others – it works for them but not for me.
There’s also really not much documentation on troubleshooting pingbacks on the WordPress site.
It is frustrating not being able to show to my readers people’s comments. But on the flip side: I have one less spam channel to worry about.
I just wanted to thank you, Paul, for your helpful suggestions.