The History and Purpose of Getting Trackbacks

Before people ever discovered that something like trackbacks might be valuable for SEO purposes, there was the original purpose.Understanding why trackbacks were created in the first place will help in the ongoing web-wide discussion about follow vs. no-follow and the debate over whether a link is worth getting if Google doesn’t give you any credit for it.

What Are Trackbacks and Why Do They Exist?

Trackbacks were created by blog software programmers to help bloggers easily link to each other and get credit for doing so with automation. Rather than writing about someone else’s blog post on your site and then writing to them to let them know you just linked to their post and asking for the possibility of them linking back to you, trackbacks automate the process.

Don’t know what a trackback is? Check out my video on how to do a trackback. And see TrackBoost.

Before people realized that trackbacks could be used for SEO, bloggers used them for the direct traffic trackback links would send them from the blogs they comment on. Not in the comments area on that blogger’s site, but remotely.

Trackbacks are sort of like “remote comments” in that, the blog you are linking to gets notified automatically that you’ve linked to a particular post and the blogger gets the same email they would had you commented directly on their blog that a comment is awaiting moderation.

They check it out and see that you’ve done a trackback.

They come to your post through the link and see that you’ve been flattering them by linking directly to their latest post in your post and explaining why you liked their post.

They go back to their moderation area and approve your trackback and it shows up in the comments area with all the other comments on that particular post you linked to.

Other readers get into the discussion on that blog, see your trackback and click the link to see what you had to say about this post. Not all, but some will do this.

That was, and still should be, the #1 reason to do a trackback above all else.

I have said thousands of times in hundreds of trainings, all my reports and books on the subject of linking, and on this blog that links are for TRAFFIC first and that any SEO benefit you might get from them is a supplemental bonus to a well rounded linking campaign. NOT the entire goal of one.

If you visit someone’s blog and they seem overly concerned about doing trackbacks only on blogs that have no-follow turned off, take that as a hint that they might not know much of what they are talking about, or at least, they have an unnatural obsession with search engines that makes their marketing campaign unhealthy and less productive for their business.

People who only look for links on sites with “follow” links are missing the point in spades. I mean they are really, seriously under a severe misconception about what linking is for.

I don’t pay any attention whatsoever to no follow and I don’t spend all day looking at peoples’ source code to detect it. It is a complete and utter waste of time to do so. This site and my traffic is proof of that.

I get links and give links based on content that will help my readers and from places where my target reader surfs. Period. End of story. Follow or no follow, it truly doesn’t matter.

The moment I stopped paying attention to every little thing Google does to rank sites, the better my site started ranking.

The things I pay attention to where SEO is concerned are simply:

1. Serving my visitors relevant, high quality content as much as possible. This makes my average pageviews go up and Google doesn’t like high bounce rates. They like to see long visits and multi-page visits to determine the value of your site to visitors.

2. I write sensible but optimized titles for my posts. If you want to score for a keyword, it had better be in the title of your post and early in the content of that post. Here you can get into serious debate over keyword density and all kinds of other things, but following this basic rule will get you far down the road before you have to worry about density. I don’t calculation density because I am writing for my readers. If the keyword gets used the “proper” amount of times it is only because it was necessary to tell the story.

3. Getting links. I get all kinds and from whatever places have resonant content to mine or surfers that are the perfect target for my content, products and services. Many are links that Google follows. Many are certainly not. I can’t be sure the exact number because I don’t care. I get links. Period. I get links because of the real or potential direct traffic they provide. Any search engine justice I get from any links I pick up is merely a symptom of a good marketing campaign. Not the entire focus.

Trackbacks Are For Traffic!

Don’t allow yourself to get caught up in the debate over follow vs. no follow. It serves no purpose but to sap your time and energy. If you land on a blog that clearly has good readership and traffic and you want to do a post pointing your visitors to a great post on that blog, but you find that the blogger uses no follow, DO IT ANYWAY!

Are you going to miss out on all the potential traffic that blogger can send you just because Google won’t give you credit for the link? I certainly hope not! But thousands of people are hung up on that fact and are missing the forest for the trees!

I see people doing trackbacks to bloggers with do follow but no traffic! They actually think that’s better than doing a trackback on a blog with no follow but a ton of readers.

Listen, Google ALSO pays attention to how popular a site is in real visitors. If you are linked from a site that is do follow that gets no traffic and never gets popular, how much is that going to be worth to you in pagerank and link juice anyway?

Forget the fact that everyone should have do follow. That cat is out of the bag and the people who chose to go the no follow route, as ridiculous as it is, have made a choice that you cannot change.

Just Get Links!

Get them from social sites (many of which Google doesn’t follow links from even if the site itself is do follow!). Get them from high, medium, and low traffic sites. Get them from anywhere and everywhere your target market surfs.

Stay away from bad neighborhoods. Check out who you are linking TO and where you are getting links FROM. Don’t be a link whore. Just be natural in the way you pick where you get link love and keep it relevant so that the traffic you get is targeted to your content and products.

Everything else works itself out just fine, trust me. This is how I do it and it’s obviously working out well for me.

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Tags: getting links, getting trackbacks, how to do a trackback, Link Building

Link Building Today

Wandering around the SEO stomping grounds today I found some good link building articles. Check these out for some new ideas on getting links to your site in creative ways.

Recent Link Building Blog Posts

Comment on Blog For A Cause Or Fabricate A Story by Link Building …

[…] Read more Blog For A Cause Or Fabricate A Story | Andy Beard - Niche Marketing […]

Tips on Content Centered Link Building

that reminds me of the interplay between content and link building. “If you don’t create useful content, you won’t attract any links. How can you attract links if you don’t have content worth linking to?”. …

Creating a Link Building Machine

Intelligent online publishers have been creating Link Building Machines for years but others try to rely on short term fixes. The short term fix (as you might have guessed) isn’ta good long term business strategy. …

Internal Linking & Site Depth

Many people make a common mistake, which is not getting links to pages other than their homepage. Many times you’ll see pages with 98% of all their links going to their index page. This isn’t the best practice, it is best to deep link. …

9 Critical Steps to Evaluating Incoming Link Quality — By Stephen …

After all, getting links from authoritative sites is valuable even if you do have to share the link-juice. Just be aware that the fewer the outgoing links on a page, the more link-equity (PageRank) is being passed along to you. …

Getting Links From .Edu Web Sites

Getting links from high traffic web sites is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your web site. Some of the most trafficked sites on the Net include .edu and .gov sites because they contain lots of content focused on a particular …

Tags: getting links, link bait, Link Building, seo

TrackBoost: 5 Minutes to Killer Backlinks!

Be honest. How much time did you spend last week getting relevant, keyword-laden backlinks from other bloggers in your niche?

10 minutes? An hour? None at all? Watch this video on a new piece of software that will change the game so you can finally take advantage of the kind of link building you SHOULD be doing without spending more time on your blog. In fact, you’ll spend less!

Trackbacks are a pain to remember each time you do a post. Yet there are likely a lot of people talking about the same topic you just posted about out in the blogosphere. People who are more than willing to to link back to YOU talking about THEM.

And not only that, but they will gladly link back to you using your post title as the link. Think SEO. Think keyword anchor text links.

Then think…Trackboost.

Everyone is in a hurry once they’ve finished a post. No one wants to get done with a post and then have to go out and search the Sphere for relevant further information and posts that their readers would appreciate.

Everyone knows the value of a good link. People spend a TON of time trying to get them. Yet bloggers rarely spend enough time on trackbacks, some of the best linkage you can get for direct traffic and SEO. This is because it extends the amount of time you have to work on each post doing the research, grabbing trackback links, and setting the links to the posts you recommend in the post you just made.

The entire mess has been corrected. Watch this video and you’ll see. Bloggers are gaining a new best friend this week.

Trackboost comes out this week. Watch this spot for the release and then grab it and get all your posts linked up with no sweat!

Check out our other software:

Utility Poster: Blogging just got a whole lot easier!
Video Utility Poster: Video blogging just got a whole lot easier!
Web2Submitter: Posting to social news sites just got a whole lot faster!

Tags: getting links, how to do a trackback, trackboost review, trackboost video, using trackboost, what are trackbacks

Tipzu - Full blown HTML enabled content network

Want to get in early on a new site? The creator of Tipzu is asking for beta testers for a new Web 2.0 property.

What’s Cool About Tipzu?

The thing I like the most about it is it is unrestricted. You can link out in any way you want from the content you publish there. It accepts articles with full HTML control and has a ton of other great features like:

• Publishing Multiple Articles
• Full HTML control
• Revenue Sharing
• Add Video’s, Opt-In Forms
• Build Multiple Landing Pages
• Blog Platform
• RSS
• Title Tag Control
• Comments
• Build A User Base Community
• Newsletter with RSS

It’s Squidoo, Hubpages + Blogspot in one…

It is worth a hard look. This is going to help a lot of publishers with SEO and the network will attract a good deal of traffic as word grows and it comes out of beta.

To check it out and become a beta tester, head over to Jon’s welcome video which shows you all the features and gives FTR readers a “back door” into the site.

Tags: beta testers, Content Syndication, getting links, Link Building, seo, tipzu, web 2.0 marketing

Social Power Linking Video

Want to peek inside Social Power Linking? We granted Davin Ogden, a Social Power Linking member, access behind the scenes to expose just what’s inside.

He didn’t think our sales materials properly conveyed the value of SPL. He’s right. Maybe this look inside Social Power Linking will show people just how serious we are about over delivery!

Tags: getting links, getting traffic, social marketing, social power linking

Building True Social Authority

Below is what social authority begins to look like after you’ve mastered the art of social marketing. The list includes all my main profiles on social communities, social news sites, marketing groups, and remote blogs and pages. They are the sites I visit most frequently and get the most out of as far as traffic, links, and branding.

Note what Darren Rowse outlined in his video about keeping a consistent profile across all your sites as much as possible. Clicking through the sites below you’ll see that I’ve tried to do just that over time and it really helps with branding.

Social Power Linking is about showing up everywhere your target market surfs. This list isn’t complete. I just got tired of building it and stopped at what I thought were the main sites in my arsenal. I consider the value of belonging to the site (traffic it generates, link love it sends, and the value of the networks of contacts generated).

Digg - Pownce - Tumblr - Squidoo - LinkedIn - HubPages - YouTube - Twitter - WetPaint - SpongeFish

Tipzu - My 9rules - Revver - Mashable - Ojeez - Social Marketing Central - Blog Marketing Search

Delicious - PlugIM - Sphinn - MySpace - Facebook - Propeller - StumbleUpon - MyBlogLog - Blog Catalog

SelfGrowth Network - FriendFee - Fave - Entrecard - Windows Live Spaces

Add to the main sites above all the 2nd tier sites you inevitably join to test them out and check out the community “liveliness,” and the list quadruples in size.

Now, looking at the sample sites above, is it hard to imagine why social marketing works as well as it does? Everything we do in life, if it is worth doing at all, is a lot of work. Social marketing is no exception.

But while most of my competitors are doing traditional SEO, JVs, list mailing, and basically the same as everyone else in my niche, I am out there grabbing fresh prospects who are not on anyone’s list in my niche.

The “Born On Date” of the list members of many experts in my niche indicates a large number of people on all these lists have “expired.” You will find a good percentage of the most jaded, tight fisted prospects on great big lists whose owners have not been adding fresh prospects. Rather, they trade jaded, non-viable list members, clients, and customers back and forth depending on who is launching what at the time.

Freshening the customer base in my niche is where the money is.

People who haven’t been scammed or become jaded are far more receptive to good quality offers and tips than people the big gurus keep trading back and forth as they mail for each other.

Therefore I don’t need to have a list of 1 million people just to get by. The list of devoted, regular readers you create by authority blogging converts better, far better, than traditionally generated readerships and lists.

Consider that as you decide who to listen to when it comes to marketing online.

Every niche has this problem to a lesser degree. But none beats the IM niche for stale lists. It’s because everyone does joint ventures and simply “swaps spit” without bringing in significant new, fresh faces. Social marketing allows me to reach out and capture high quality prospects who surf the social scene and who have never heard of any of the gurus of internet marketing. (If you wanted to know one of my secrets - there it is!)

So, social marketing in any niche will also produce very fresh faces to inform and then sell to while increasing your search engine rankings, link popularity, branding, and overall niche authority. This is because most people do it wrong who are trying it without professional guidance.

Man cannot exist on “free blog tips” alone where social marketing is concerned!

Social Power Linkers “get it” and they are doing really well with social marketing compared to the results they were getting before learning Social Power Linking.

Tags: getting links, Link Building, social authority, social marketing, social media marketing, social power linking

Getting Links: Here’s how the Pros do it…

I found some great resources for getting more links in my travels through social space today and I thought I’d better share them with you.

17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You: One of the best ways to get links and generate buzz is to get bloggers to write about what you’re doing. Boing Boing co-author Cory Doctorow provides some tips on making it easy for bloggers to point to you.

10 Good Links You Can Get in the Next 50 Minutes: This week we thought we’d give you ten quick ways to get some links so that you can take a breather from the strenuous stuff and still feel good about adding real link value to your site.

Matt Cutts on Getting Links: Okay, here are some ways to get high-quality links without emailing, paying, or even paying attention to search engines. (Note: This was written in 2005 and is still a quality source of link-getting!)

When I wrote Power Linking first edition in 2002, I said that the most important factor for marketing online was, is, and always will be getting links. Since then the tactics have changed and trends have come and gone, yet links still remain the fabric (or the threads) of the web.

I am confident that I will be able to write the same thing in 2010 and 2025.

Tags: getting links, Link Building, link building tips, matt cutts

Social Power Linking Community 100 Strong in 24 Hours

Edit: SPL blew past the 200 member mark today, December 20th. Many reviews from members are posted below…

—

Without much fanfare, no months long teaser campaign, and zero hype, Social Power Linking re-launched yesterday.

Over 100 people signed up to experience something they weren’t expecting: a packed-to-the-gills training center on web 2.0 social marketing and Power Linking tactics designed to boost any site’s traffic from insignificant to major niche player in a short amount of time.

Traffic that, if you were to pay for it via Adwords or by hiring an SEO firm, would cost you tens of thousands of dollars per year. Power Linkers, of course, don’t pay for traffic we can get for free.

And our organically driven traffic is more qualified and converts higher than your average Adwords traffic.

We Might Have Done 200+ If Our Price Was Higher!

Because everyone has been trained over the last year to think that quality means paying $997.00 for a course or $197.00 per month for a membership, we had a lot of people thinking this was a hastily thrown together “side show” community.

Some figured it was just a lead in for ASC with light content to tease them to a higher priced membership.

On all counts, those folks were wrong.

What we are doing with our low price point is pricing for volume. Many gurus tell people when creating products to work up to large ticket items. Now people are simply launching formerly $20-$50/month sites at $97-$197.00. Same volume and quality of content as before, just higher priced because they see “everyone else” doing it.

Also, a lot of people know their product only appeals to a certain number of people and they have to price it high to make a profit on low sales volume. That’s natural and good.

But Social Power Linking appeals to the masses.

The market for people looking to get more free traffic to their sites is massive. Combine what people are charging hundreds or thousands per month for, with mass appeal and low price point, and you have SPL.

Our Network Must Be Big

Because we have things built into the community like content swaps, keyword swaps, and other tactics to help members network and get more valuable links, bigger is better. The more members we have, the more opportunities for individual members to pick up killer links and traffic.

So we are doing really cool stuff to ensure we hit our first benchmark at the end of January of 1000 members.

Everyone who signs up for SPL automatically gets enrolled in the affiliate program. When a member writes a review or a success story using one of our tactics with their affiliate link embedded, their site gets promoted by our staff!

When is the last time you joined an affiliate program and got promoted by the product owner’s staff of Power Linking Ninjas?

That’s just what we do. We get you links, votes in the social sites, submissions and any other links we can for you. Think what that does for your affiliate sales. Now, think what that will do for your entire domain in the engines and for list signups, sales, and direct traffic all over your domain!

We, of course, promote your review page, but we are increasing the value and link popularity of your whole domain in the process.

That’s worth $29.95 about 100 times over.

That’s a peek at how we’ll be building this membership to thousands of Power Linkers in short order. Everyone involved with the community will benefit in so many ways for so little money that it will take off like a California wildfire.

So, if you are one of the thousands who took a look yesterday but decided it was too good to be true, take another look because once in a blue moon something actually is better than advertised.

We don’t like to have massive launches and make people sick of hearing from us through our hundreds of JV partners. It’s not our style. But don’t let the fact that people aren’t lighting themselves on fire to get your attention about this fool you into thinking it’s not the place for you to be to grow your presence on the web.

Give Social Power Linking a try for 30 days.

If it isn’t paying for itself with just one good link you pick up that might otherwise cost you $50+ per month if you had to pay for it, just ask for a refund. Simple.

Social Power Linking Reviews and Stories

• Andy Beard
• Neil Shearing
• Richard Mathiason
• Rick Hendershot
• Tuesdays With Maury
• The Power Of Social Linking Illustrated by Brittany Spears
• David Lee Venters
• Give Him The Gift of Traffic
• Andrew Daum
• Sly Marketing
• Tony Zayas
• Social Power Linking - Does It Deliver?
• Internet Home Business Blog Review of Social Power Linking
• Review on Zimbio
• Generating Web 2.0 Traffic
• En Espanol: Alberto Abudara
• The Home Business Archive

Tags: getting links, getting traffic, seo, social power linking, social power linking review

Aggressive Link Building or Stupid Link Building?

There are always discussions like this one going on in forums with people looking for help, salvation, or forgiveness after getting what they might call “too aggressive” in their link building.

Have you ever been tempted to just take up one of the myriad offers to spend $10 to “get your site linked on thousands of pages?” We all have at some point. It is frustrating waiting on Google. Sometimes you might let yourself actually believe you can speed up the process by “aggressively” adding hundreds or thousands of links to your site from extremely useless and junky “neighborhoods.”

It should be frustrating to wait on Google because waiting on Google is STUPID! Waiting on any single source of organic traffic to kick in as if you don’t have a thousand other things you can do to bring traffic is ridiculous.

Google will come around when they are damn good and ready. They will rank you when they feel like it. Yes you can make sure they know about you ASAP, but you cannot force a billion-dollar advertising agency to just drop everything and pay attention to your site with a #1 listing because you think it would be nice.

No amount of artificial link buying will make the process go any faster with results that you are going to be happy with in the long-term. You might fake Google out for a minute, but they will adjust to stupid link building and take appropriate action to knock you back down to earth.

And it hurts really bad when that’s the only significant source of traffic you have. This is when people usually see the writing on the wall and start realizing Google is one website on the internet. High traffic, yes, but still one source of traffic on a web with thousands of extremely high traffic sites.

Spending too much time on engines means you are neglecting all the other traffic available to you. Traffic from social media sites, satellite pages, and profiles on social or web 2.0 sites like Squidoo* are the bread and butter. Scoring in Google might feel likea steak dinner, but it doesn’t happen without buttering your bread first. *Yes Squidoo is alive and well as you will see in Vegas or shortly after if you aren’t coming.

Link building is one part know-how, two parts organic because of good content, and one part old fashioned hard work and dedication.

No where in the recipe is buying 1000 crappy links. It doesn’t work. Even if Google doesn’t penalize you for it you won’t get anything out of it. Believe me, I’ve tested it at least twice per year for the last several years just to make absolutely sure!

Tags: blog linking, free link building, getting links, Link Building

Link Building With Authoritative Directories

Hard Core Link Building Using The Web’s Most Trusted Directories

This is going to cost money. But the ROI (return on investment) for your business will be incredible in terms of traffic and rankings.

If you hit the top 5-6 directories listed below, expect to spend a bit, but then watch your traffic and rankings rise disproportionately more than what you spend compared to other paid advertising.

Why Does Google Love Human Edited Paid Directories?

Because they are an easy place to pick up content that has passed through two powerful filters:

1. Human Editors: Human editors for directories that have good rules in place for only accepting sites with original content that are managed by real people and not bot-created and managed sites are highly prized by the directories and by Google. When Google finds sites in the directories below, they know they are quality sites. Google hits the big directories very often to sift for more sites and new content.

2. The Money Filter: Whatever costs money will be ignored by spammers. Spammers are thieves by nature and they certainly don’t want to lay down cash for any reason. Therefore directories that charge to be listed are spam free. Another reason Google and other engines use them to find “trusted” content.

The next benefit to us webmasters is these directories, like Business.com, get gargantuan amounts of traffic. You will get more traffic from the directories below once you are approved and listed.

What’s The Difference Between Trusted, Paid Directories And Submitting To 500,000 Link Directories?

The difference is night and day. If anyone can submit a link to a directory, Google and the rest of the world know it and don’t use it to find content like people do on the trusted directories. Don’t buy stupid submission programs that submit you to a bunch of link farms. It won’t do you a lick of good.

Here are a few very necessary places to be listed:

• Best of the Web: This is an old directory with a ton of monthly visitors, high pagerank, and high trust value. Listing Fee: $69.95 annually. Submit Your Site To BOTW Directory For 60 Days Free!
• Yahoo Directory: Trusted because it is human edited and it costs a pretty penny to be listed. Listing Fee: $299.00 per year. Well worth the price. Submit to Yahoo Directory
• Starting Point: Fast listings in a high traffic, trusted directory. Listing Fee: $99.00

Here are a whole mess of other high quality directories listed by traffic and pagerank:

• Strongest Links

Get the best link building strategies and search engine optimization reports, insider tips, and the best of the best in link popularity information from SEOMoz.org.

Tags: getting links, Link Building, link directories, link popularity, seo

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