Steve Rubel thinks that trackbacks feel irrelevant!

These days, however, the TrackBack feels irrelevant. Sebastian Kiel agrees with me. So does Jeff Harrell. It's been replaced by little widgets that have the same effect. You'll notice that all of my posts have a chicklet that show the number of links and diggs. This is powered by Feedburner.

Jeff Harrell thinks trackbacks are becoming useless.

Do people still use trackbacks? Have they fallen out of vogue because they’re rarely automatic and a pretty significant pain to invoke manually?

I’m thinking about disabling them on this site, and removing them from the checklist of features I include on new sites I build.

Here's the flaw in the thinking of folks who think that the widget and chicklet will kill the trackback!

Widgets and chicklets are selfish! By disabling trackbacks in favor of chicklets /widgets your forcing your user to take an extra step to see who else is involved in the conversation.

On my blog, when I receive a trackback, it appears in the top of the comments for each post and the user can quickly and easily see what other blogs are involved in the conversation.  Why would I make my readers jump through hoops and force them to click through to other services in order to see if any other blogs are involved in the conversation.

Now, I'm not saying that chicklets or widgets are bad. I just fail to see the benefit behind forcing your users to click through to another site to see who's linking in.

Okay, not everybody sends trackbacks (why not you fools?) and the external services do provide a means of seeing who is in the conversation but hasn't sent a trackback.

Yes there can be an issue sometimes with trackback spam. But it's not that big an issue! I receive over 1000 comment spams a day, and very few, if any lately have been trackback spam. Quite a few months ago I got hit by a lot of trackback spam, but it never made it onto the blog.

There are plenty of tools available to protect you site from comment and trackback spam.

I have sent trackbacks and pings to blogs only to find out that the blogger in question has disabled them.

These people are, selfish! They've robbing their readers of easy discovery of other bloggers with valid opinions on the same topic. They're robbing their readers because they're to lazy to install a few plugins and moderate their comments.

Some folks will say, that some of the reason for this is because they want to keep readers on their site and not have them click off to other blogs.

If so why would you employ chicklets/widgets on your blog?

As was looking  at the comments on Steve and Jeff's blogs I see that they both still have trackbacks enabled .

I also spotted this excellent comment by Lorelle on Jeff's blog. I'm reproducing it here as I don't seem to be able to link directly to the comment! (Actually I don't think I can do that on this blog either! I'll have to fix that!)

Trackbacks are essential and invaluable. In many respects, I’d rather have a trackback than a comment.

A trackback says “someone’s talking about you”. It connects your blog to another blog, building the dynamic energy of links in the true definition of the web.

It isn’t about “link juice” or popularity contests. People can add all the judgments they want to trackbacks, but that is all they do. Alert you that someone has posted your blog post in their blog. Whether or not they are saying something isn’t part of their job description. They just say “you have been mentioned”.

A trackback is much like a reference in a research paper or doctoral thesis. It is credit. And it is nice that it happens automatically.

Trackbacks help to alert you to possible splogs and copyright violations. If you include a link back to your blog and blog posts in your post, if it gets scraped by feed scrapers, you will get a trackback that alerts you to their illegal use of your content.

Not many people still use Technorati for the end all and be all of their research or monitoring world. They are too busy Twittering.

If you haven’t gotten a legitimate trackback in ages, then consider what and how you write. Maybe you haven’t written anything lately worth linking to and discussing off your blog? I don’t know. There is certainly a lot of competition for links now. But I’d look at that first before slamming an incredibly powerful tool in the blogging and web world.

As I read through the comments I'm forced to notice that many of the ones which agree that trackbacks are dead are heavily based in the "I", such as this one by Tiffany!

I think Lorelle’s opinion of trackbacks is stuck in 2003.

When I had incoming trackbacks enabled, I literally spent an hour every morning cleaning the crap up off my blog and out of my inbox that had accumulated overnight. Even when I turned them off in the interface, spammers still found ways to abuse the system, so I finally had to delete the trackback script itself from the server to get any peace. And not just on my personal blog- my professional blog, frequently linked to and talked about in its niche- because Trackback wasn’t giving me anything I couldn’t get from a combination of other tools that had the advantage of not covering my blog in ads for hentai and online poker.

And of course no one relies just on Technorati- they also use referrer logs, Google tools, web stats packages, del.icio.us, etc. to track who is saying what about whom. But Trackback/Pingback is a broken tool. It hasn’t been “incredibly powerful” in years. For every legitimate trackback I was getting (and there were quite a few), I was getting easily 200 spam ones. Not an effective use of my time, and certainly not an efficient way of telling me where I was getting linked from.

Comments such as the one written by Tiffany betray a mindset that makes me reluctant to visit her blog. (I have never read Tiffany's blog, so I'm not commenting on the quality of her blog, simply the comment in question).

The comment shows a self-centric attitude only concerned with the author tracking what other people might be writing about her. It shows no regard, nor desire to have her readers involved in the larger conversation.

I believe that people enjoy blogs because they are a link centric information source. When I read an interesting post on a blog I usually read the comments as well. If there are trackbacks I sometimes follow them.

I never, repeat NEVER go to Technorati or any other service and perform a search to ascertain who's linking to a particular post on somebody else's blog.

My assumption is that if there's no trackbacks and few or no comments then nobodies talking!

If the topic is actually important enough or interesting enough some one else will have written about and it  will turn up in my feed reader. Unfortunately, I will probably miss many great posts related to the article and I don't get to see trackbacks in my feed reader.

There's also the issue that many bloggers are not inclined to link to blogs that have trackbacks disabled. But that's a whole other post!

At the end of the day, if you disable trackbacks you're not only being selfish, but robbing your readers of the broader conversation!

Here's a question? Are bloggers who disable trackbacks (and/or comments) displaying a fear of possibly being contradicted or proven wrong before the eyes of their readers?

This post originally appeared on Paul OFlahertys Technology Blog.

© 2007 Paul OFlaherty

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