Absolute Beginner Blogging #8 – Those Funny Links called Trackbacks
You will start to notice at some point comments showing up on your site, that are quotes from someone else’s site. If you click on them, you will find someone else who linked to you.
The problem is at least initially, that many of these are actually junk, and here is why.
There are websites out there where the owner does not bother to actually create any content on the site. Instead he will just steal your writing and put it on his site. We call these stealers of writing, scrapers. Yes, there is probably something you could do about it, but it is often just not worth the work. The scrapers are usually doing it so they can put ads on their site and make money off of it.
If there is a good link to your site, when you click on the excerpt, it will take you to the page on the other site. The other sites page will then have an original article that might reference your site, and not just be a rip off of your writing. If I link to one of my friends blogs, Taylor and his new bride to be, then it will show up in his comments as a quote from this page. Taylor can then let that excerpt show up in his comments, or he can delete me if he thinks this is spam!
You can usually sort out quickly if it is a scraper site linking to you or a real one, by just looking at the site. If the site is full of other peoples stolen materials, then it is just junk, and I would delete the comment. If it is a link and an excerpt from someone’s real site, then you can either leave it, or delete it. For some of my sites I just delete them so it does not take people off of my site. For this site, I usually leave the comment and the excerpt in my comments.
These excerpts and links by the way are called trackbacks.
Here is a list of all the wordpress beginner blogger posts
How to Blog for Absolute Beginners – #1 Start
Absolute Begining Blogging #2 – Catagories
Absolute Beginner Blogging #3 Leaving a Comment
Absolute Beginner Blogging #4 Handling Comments
Absolute Beginner Blogging #5 – Modifying a Published Post
Absolute Beginner Blogging #6 – Generating Viewers
Absolute Beginner Blogging #7 – Links
Absolute Beginner Blogging #8 – Those Funny Links called Trackbacks
Great writeup dk! No way I would think anything you write is spam 😉
ReplyIsn’t that considered plagiarism? I mean, if the scrapers are just stealing work. I guess if they are quoting and linking to your site it’s not plagiarism. I have never heard of trackbacks though. This explains a lot of the comments on certain blogs that I just don’t understand. Kind of out of context, some of them.
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