Trackbacks – Or Lack Thereof

Today Kasia noted that she hadn’t gotten a proper trackback to her blog since August. Forgetting that I had trackbacks active, I took a look at my TypePad control panel: I got one in December… but I have only been pinged 54 times over five years… and I’ve had at least 54 spam pings come in over the years that had to be deleted by hand I’ve also noticed that Steve also pulled’m from the ‘Goat, but I can’t remember when that happened; since I link to him a few times a month, it shows how often I’ve used trackbacks in my own posts. Screw that.

For what it’s worth, I’ve had 888 posts [excluding this one] and 3367 comments [of which half are probably me!] but I’m pretty much done with trackbacks…


6 thoughts on “Trackbacks – Or Lack Thereof”

  1. Hmmm. I haven’t linked to any posts (just to the SharpMT category).

    One thing I’ve turned on in my MT blog is internal discovery, so that my posts can send trackbacks to each others. That’s a great way to link a “continuing” story. I.e., I have the post last week about X. This week I post something continuing the saga of X, linking back to that original post — which, in turn, gets a trackback to the follow-up post.

    So if someone (including myself) finds the original post, they can continue up the chain to find “the rest of the story.”

    Aside from that — I get maybe a trackback or two a month. I get very few spam trackbacks any more (and MT catches them before they show up anywhere).

  2. @Jay – Linked to via link or actually sending trackbacks? Going back over the last 5 in the list, I don’t see your domain in the list. I know you’ve pointed to the blog, though, via blog search engines… just not with trackbacks.

    @Dave – Yeah, I was getting a bunch while still on TypePad – some as recent as January. I just don’t think that it was worth leaving it open, looking at the numbers. I doubt anyone besides us geeks will miss it :)

  3. Right – that’s a link, so that’ll show up in places like Technorati and Blogline Citations… Trackbacks would have required that you got a special link from my post – which don’t get posted anymore – and then put into the “Pings” section of your post as you posted it. That then would have shown up in my TypePad list of trackbacks and on the original post, once I refreshed the data.

    I’d say your MT rig is OK :)

  4. Interestingly, SixApart has submitted Trackback to make it a standard (and break it apart from a company-oriented implementation).

    Still think it’s worthwhile, but a lot of people have decided otherwise.


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