WordSpreadsQuickly.com

Trackbacks are a great way to say “I like what you’ve said.” And, they are a simple a way to notify a site when you publish and reference a specific post. But a form a social marketing? That’s a stretch.

Wire services have been trying to do a better job to boost distribution for individual releases including firms like MarketWire, however, press releases as a content category are very perishable search engine content. In part, because wire services pull down content releases from servers after two months. Adding trackbacks isn’t going to provide any additional benefit. That’s a major issue that will have to be addresses because search engine place a high value in the ranking of content that is sourced to the originator of the content. If you’re simply reposting other content, you may get the page indexed but it doesn’t mean it will be ranked or rank well. In fact, Google is taking steps in their latest index update to address content duplication and related malicious content spamming that is designed to increase indexing and ranking which is now just starting to propagate. Google’s new index update will also include closing up the 302 redirect exploit.

Keep in mind that Trackbacks are similar to backlinks in that they are both simply types of links. Backlinks are the links to a page or site from another page or site that are embedded in HTML which is central to Google’s PageRank patent on scoring and ranking relevancy based on the quality and quantity of inbound links to a page. These links can include anchor text which service as a title for the link and, anchor text content is also assessed by search engines as part of their ranking algorithm. Trackbacks also have a title element that appears when you give someone a trackback that is a short excerpt of your post that appears on the site/post you’ve referenced.

As a blogger, I don’t want trackbacks I want pingbacks.

When sending a trackback, you’re basically telling search engines to nullify link relevancy because you are now both linking to each other directly. If you’re really into indexing your site and scoring high for desired keyword phrases or tags, you want one-way links not reciprocal links.

In fact, if you’re using trackbacks actively – which I’m not but WordPress does include a hyperlink in individual posts that you can pull out – you need to be careful not to spam the site with a second automated link. If you’re using update services like http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ to let people know when you’ve updated your blog you may be sending them a link already. If the site you’re linking to has pingbacks enabled, don’t use trackbacks because you’re likely to end up posting two links to their site. This annoys site owners and is likely to view as spam by engines.

Are trackbacks a nice way to show that you gets lots of comments – sure. However, automation doesn’t equal something more beneficial in this instance in terms of socialization or content ranking.

TAGS: Steve Rubel, Stowe Boyd, Social marketing, trackbacks, search engines, content indexing, pagerank, Google