Public service announcement for bloggers, it’s come to my attention that even though I may be one of the geekiest folks around, I just have to have the most toys, gadgets, websites, computers, servers, you name it and yet until about a month ago I had no idea what on earth a trackbacks and pings from a blog were actually for, nor was a really running any blogs of my own for some reason or another.

Allowing comments on your blog can be a great thing, but the ‘comment spam’ is getting crazy, i for one certainly don;t want my blogs filled with crud from online casino, pharms or other crap like that, for one I don’t want to see it, and two; links to ‘bad neighborhoods’ such as those never do you any good if you are using your blog for website or keyword promotion. So if you use them, be smart about it and turn on the moderation controls were you have to specifically approve or disapprove a comment, yes the extra few minutes wasted could be spent elsewhere, but now at least you know when you’ve received a new comment, and not get hammered by these silly little spam bots running amok.

Back to the topic at hand, it comes to mind that many others who have been blogging for a long time don’t have a clue what a trackback or ping from a blog is for, how to use them, or why they should use them. So here’s your explanation;

“Trackback” is a feature that provides an automated process to alert another bloger that you have mentioned a post or their blog in yours, it also provides for a link to the other blog, thus creating a mini-community of sorts. It also adds content for their blog and a link back to yours. A good tool for gaining backlinks (take a look under my fledgeling Webmaster/SEO Tools category, small but nothing but quality tools and links to quality info there).

A Ping, first that is what is sent to another blog you just linked a trackback to (tells their blog you trackbacked them (the software will generally come back to your blog and grab a copy or excerpt of your entry and post it as a comment on that blog). It can also serve other purposes, I know WordPress has it as a standard feature, I would guess others do as well, anytime a comment or blog entry is made the blog software will Ping whatever services you tell it to that your blog has been updated, they in turn will generally come back and grab your syndication feed and add it to their list of recent posts on their service or subscription page.

At least for WordPress blogs, if you click the Title of the entry, that will give you a link to the tackback URL/URI, clicking on comment will do the same thing for WP and most others out there.

Pretty simple really, wether you are looking for more readers, better search engine page results, or just more content, try it, instead of commenting on this entry, use your blog to post the comment and set the backtrack to this article, any magically you will add content to both of our blogs.