New bloggers and bloggers who are new to blog marketingmay not use or understand trackbacks. A trackback is an automated notification that someone has posted a link to your blog in their blog. The notification appears in your blog in the comments related to the post being blogged about. So the question is: “From a search engine perspective, do trackbacks help?”

For the new blogger, the simple answer is yes and no. Initially, trackbacks were calculated into ranking algorithms, but trackbacks can be (and are) abused, most frequently by spammers. Most search engine algorithms don’t count trackbacks the way they did in the past.

Are trackbacks still a good thing? You bet! Links from other blogs are always good, even if they don’t produce a measurable change in the search engine results. Remember, the goal for a new blogger is to build the audience. If another blogger is talking about you or your blog, he or she is drawing attention to you. That’s what you want. Yes, search engine placement is good, but there are more effective search engine placement techniques.

If a blogger is talking about you regularly, or vice versa, consider exchanging blogroll listings. Thatwill help, provided that your blogs are on related subject matter.

A blogroll listing from a related blog is worth a lot. If trackbacks produce that relationship, or deliver potential new audience members to your blog, they’re doing their job. They can also help you monitor the traffic to your blog and find out where your readers come from.

As a new blogger, if you don’t have trackbacks turned on and you want to experiment with them for awhile, you can enable them, usually in the configuration options for your blog. These auto-notifications are uniformly referred to as TrackBacks on the most popular Web platforms. You’ll want to set your blog to allow TrackBacks or notifications from other Weblogs.

Once TrackBacks are turned on, your blog will notify you when it receives a TrackBack from another blog. TrackBacks provide a simple way to find out who’s reading your blog, and can give you an introduction to other bloggers in your field. You can also find additional training and tips on changes to your blog configuration that can help you grow your blogging audience.

Photo Credit: Serge Timakov