This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz
by Peter van Ooijen.
Original Post: Stop the trackback myth
Feed Title: Peter's Gekko
Feed URL: /error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/blogs/peter.van.ooijen/rss.aspx
Feed Description: My weblog cotains tips tricks and opinions on ASP.NET, tablet PC's and tech in general.
The heading of a blog home page usually contains some statistics
like the number of posts in the blog and the number of comments.
Almost always it will mention the number of trackbacks. The codebetter blog homepage
has a list of bloggers (reverse) ordered by number of posts, with our
trackbacks. The way the latter changes over time made me suspicious.
There are liars, big liars and (blog) statistics so I would like to know what I am actually reading.
A trackback is a word everybody is using, but almost nobody can give a good definition what it really is. I went to wikipedia :
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
TrackBack is a system implemented by Movable Type and later adopted by many blogging tools, including TypePad, WordPress, and Nucleus,
that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has
written another entry concerning it. The system works by sending a 'ping' between the blogs, and therefore providing the alert.
TrackBack typically appears below a blog entry and shows a summary of what has been written on the target blog, together with a URL and the name of the blog.
The specification for TrackBack and its implementation were developed by Six Apart, creators of the MovableType weblog and content management system.
Aha, so it is invented by a specific blogging tool. And not the most
popular one amongst developers. What I know about the way .text and cs
implement trackbacks when posting is that they scan a post for links
and will send a trackback to all links found. And it's up to the
receiver what to do with them. What I have noticed about the way .text
and cs deal with incoming trackbacks is that it's next to random. The
most extreme examples I've seen is referring to some of my own posts
and seeing my count rise by six. And there are lots of links to my
post which didn't influence my count at all. So the tools used to post
and to refer determine if a trackback is seen in the statistics.
What's of real interest are referrals. In the statitstics of your
blog it's a list of links which have been followed to find the post.
Including links from google where you can see what search phrases have
been used to find your story. Referral is also in wikipedia but no-one has taken the effort yet to enter it as an internet term.
To sum it up:
Trackbacks are no open standard
Trackbacks depend on the blogging tools used
Referrals tell the real story
Should CodeBetter switch from displaying trackback count to referral
count ? Or to page hits ? A side problem would be we'de have to swich
to scientific notation :) Imho we should display nothing, it's the
content itself which counts.
Previous Topic
