What are Blog Trackbacks and They Good?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

I fielded a question from a client about his WordPress blog. He wanted to know what a trackback is and whether or not it was beneficial for his search engine optimization efforts and if he should approve them. Here’s the lowdown trackbacks.

A trackback is a type of comment that appears on one blog as a result of a blog post on another blog. Blogger A writes a blog post. Blogger B responds on his own blog and “trackbacks” to Blogger A. When Blogger A logs into his WordPress blog and looks at his comments he will see Blogger B’s trackback comment. He then has a choice to either approve it or not. If he approves the comment then the trackback will appear in the comments of Blogger A’s blog post, but the comment is essentially a summary of Blogger B’s blog post. Readers of Blogger A’s blog can click a link on the trackback and visit Blogger B’s blog to read his post on the subject.

Here is a very helpful video that I found that explains the difference between Pingbacks and Trackbacks:

So the question is, are trackbacks beneficial?

Yes, they can be. If you trackback to a high traffic blog and the administrator of that blog approves your trackback, you gain access to that blogger’s traffic. You also gain access to their PageRank and that link passes link juice. That’s it in a nutshell.