I Am So Confused or What The Hell Is A Trackback Party?

I’m old school, and not just old school, I mean old.  I have been on the internet since there were BBS’s and my first modem had a speed of 2400 baud.  We were crawling back then and it was still one of the most exciting things to ever happen.  When the 14.4 came out it was like heaven.  My eBay account is 16 years old.  When I started blogging regularly I started with WordPress when it first came out in 2003 and I’ve never looked back. For the most part it is a very simple system and it has scads of support and add-ons (plugins) to ease your way into doing anything you’d like to do online.  Before wp we had to do this thing called design our own site, and learn HTML etc. Hell I remember when there wasn’t anything such as CSS.  That didn’t come out until 1994 or thereabouts.

I take it you get it I’ve been around a while and I’m old.  Well, while you CAN teach an old dog new tricks, there are still a few things we can teach the pups and one of these things is what a trackback party is, and how it relates to getting your blog more attention.  First thing you have to know is that you have to have pingbacks and trackbacks enabled to participate.  If you follow that link I just posted in the previous sentence you will receive a good explanation of what they are and why they should be used.  (If you don’t use WordPress, Wizbang Tech’s Trackback Pinger will allow you to send one to any site that accepts them.)

Say I mention MICIADW’s video about Channing Tatum in this post I’m writing right now; IF she has trackbacks enabled she should see that I’ve mentioned her in this post in her comment section of that post and if she approves the comment then I will have a link to my site with an excerpt from this post in her comments, and as we both have a WordPress site neither of us actually has to manually input the trackback as that’s done automatically between WordPress sites as long as you have that option enabled. It works out well for both of us. She gets a link as do I, and who knows? We both could receive new readers because of one simple trackback.  Not only do you get the advantage of having your site publicized, you obtain an incoming link, and links are good for S.E.O. and page rank. Sound good so far?

This is how it works-  I write a post, you copy the url of the post to link to that post however you’d like to in YOUR post that you’d like others to see.  If it’s already written you can edit it to throw in a line or two. Something perhaps like this-  And check this out- That crazy old broad Diane is trying to teach young pups old tricks.  You take the url of this post and take some of those words in that sentence, turn it into a link, or just use the title of the post to turn into a link, or whatever, and as I said before, you’re done, trackback accomplished.  I’ll see it in my comments and as I have Facebook Comments enabled and on the front, that’s where your link and excerpt will show up unless someone logged in directly to the site, then it will be in post comments accessed by the link at the top of the post.  (Remember if you don’t use WordPress you can check out Wizbang Tech’s Trackback Pinger.)

Monthly or every day, it doesn’t matter, as long as someone is willing to keep an eye on comments you can have a trackback party, although generally it runs in a cycle from site to site and then recycles, normally weekly, and if you don’t have your comments set to be moderated before displaying, you don’t even have to keep an eye on any of it unless you suspect some weirdo of crashing said party. LOL  If you don’t have front page comments you can throw a widget up with most recent comments and set a high number or hope everyone you’re trying to interact with has enough sense to click on your comments link, OR if you have the time, you can add each trackback manually from comments to the bottom of your post.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s there are plenty of ways to skin that cat.

The last trackback party I could find was in 2008, and guess what boys and girls, started to become popular about that time?  That’s right, it was Facebook and its gaining popularity saw a decline in blogging as everyone rushed to the greener grass. Lately the grass is getting a bit brown, and people are looking to the wider web once more, so I see no reason not to bring back what once worked very well for the blogging world before Facebook.  If there are sites hosting trackback parties now, I sure couldn’t find them, although I did find some sites that are still posting that USED to and may want to be invited.

Now what I’m confused about is a group of people that got together to try to help each other with promoting their websites by sharing each other’s posts.  This is all fine and good but as yet I haven’t seen how this works or where the shares are, although I did see one that was shared to a Facebook page, and if that is how it’s supposed to work then cool. Share your site to FB. Sounds like a solid idea. Like I said, I’m so confused.

I’m throwing this idea out to them as an additional option, because, believe it or not, there are people that do read blogs and visit websites that never set fingers to keyboard in Facebook, and putting your information in front of as many people as possible is what’s important.

And I may be old and set in my ways, BUT-

I’m not too old to flirt with Dakota Fred-flirting with fred
BTW- I have a Facebook group that is about blogging and I answer questions there and give some advice, be that as it may. If anyone would like to be included in that group just comment on this post.

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