Build My Site for Free

Hi. Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. Today’s tutorial is about trackbacks. Now trackbacks are comments left on your blog by other blogs, not by actual viewers. Now when you write posts, what happens is in that post, you can give a link to a post made by another blog, which of course, would be a different blog than yours.

What then happens is you publish that post. And once you have done this, your blog sends a message to that blog that you have made a link to them. This is called a ping or a network ping. Then that blog can post a receipt that they’ve gotten your message, and the whole point of this is to acknowledge other blogs. Especially if you like something that that blogger has written, you’ll use a trackback, and it’s to pretty much compliment that blogger and to show them that you like what they’ve written.

So to go about actually adding a trackback, you do need a specific version of WordPress. So where it would appear is if you’re on your Add New Post or Edit Post page, you would scroll down to the bottom of the textbox right here, and it would be underneath here.

Usually, you’ll have an option to add an excerpt for that specific post to put on your Blogroll, or you’ll actually have a textbox here where you would insert the URL of that blog, which would be how you would go about adding that trackback. However, the version I’m using does not have this option, but what I’m going to show you is how to actually manage this trackback option and to set it.

So what you would want to do is come over to your “Settings” link. Open it up, and you scroll down to where it says “Discussion,” right where my cursor is. This will bring you to your Discussion Settings page. And the only box you need to check off for this is right here, this second one, I’m going to constantly check it so you can see what I’m doing. By checking this, you are allowing these trackbacks to occur. So you’re allowing these link notifications to get to your blog and to be given to that blog.

If you do not want trackbacks, all you’ve got to do is uncheck this box and then, of course, scroll down and you want to save your changes. However, trackbacks are a good thing, so for most people and most bloggers, you’re going to want to keep this feature by checking that box.

Now the last thing I do want to mention is that your blog must report trackback protocol for this to work. And this has been a video about trackbacks. Please stay tuned for more videos. Thank you.