It must be admitted that I am a newbie when it comes to some of the new blog terminology out there. After writing the snippet about TheRegisters interview of an unnamed link spammer, I wanted to know more about the “traceback” feature of blogs, what it means, how it works, that sort of thing.

I found my answers and figured I’d share them here so other people can get an answer in Google to the What is a traceback? question. A traceback (also called a “trackback” by some) is used as an alternative to posting a big comment on someone else’s blog. Instead, you post about the subject on your own blog, and then put a traceback URL in pointing to the post on the other blog your post is referring to. The blog with the story you were posting about receives the traceback and can include a link to your blog article in their own system. It is basically a form of content aggregation between web sites.

The talk about traceback spamming is I presume when some nasty type posts tracebacks to your blog that link back to spammers blogs trying to flog all manner of stuff you usually read about in spam. (or try not to read about as is most likely the case.) So there you have it, a traceback/trackback is a method of automatically cross linking articles of similiar subject matter between blogs. There is a pretty good explaination of traceback/trackback at the movable type blog site here.

This article was posted on Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 at 5:15 pm