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Understanding Trackback URL

  1. patorjk
    Member

    I think I understand the idea of trackbacks. Others link to your post, and then a link to their posts shows up in the comments of your post. However, I've been looking at my awstats and seeing something I don't really understand. URLs like the following will show up:

    /blog/2007/06/14/scatterbrained/trackback/
    /blog/2007/04/15/spot-lighted-site-04152007/trackback/

    Saying the link has received 100+ views for this month (domain is patorjk.com). Yet there are no trackback links in those posts and those URLs are old, and I can't find any posts linking to them on google. I'm not sure why anyone would come to the site via a URL like that. Could these be spam robots (I have cleared a lot of spam via Akismet)? Is there any reason a "/trackback" would be appended to an incoming URL? Any insight would be appreciated, I've been scratching my head over this.

  2. judyb12
    Member

    You are asking about a blog not hosted at wordpress.com, and i'm not sure we can help you. Please read the sticky at the head of the forum:
    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=3700&page&replies=1

  3. patorjk
    Member

    It's not really a domain-specific question though. I'm just don't understand how someone could reach a site via a URL with a "/trackback" appended to it. Where did this "/trackback" part get added? Especially if there are no trackback links in the actual post.

  4. drmiketemp
    Member

    It's not really a domain-specific question though.

    Actually it is as well as being a software specific question. You're running different software than we do here as well as being at a different hosting company.

    Like walking into a Ford dealership to get your Chevy fixed.

    Or going to Yahoo's support site for their hosting when you have a website hosted at 1and1.

    But to answer your question, the trackback is something the wordpress software does internally to handle trackbacks. It's not an actual page within your website and, in fact, if you were to load one of those URL:s into your browser, it would reload the blog post in question. Some themes do not display the trackback link or URL but wordpress knows how to deal with it.

    Good luck,
    -drmike

  5. patorjk
    Member

    Like walking into a Ford dealership to get your Chevy fixed.

    I'm running a WordPress blog though, it's just not one that's not hosted on wordpress.com (I installed the software at patorjk.com - patorjk.com doesn't host me). Anyway, sorry if this isn't the right place for this queston. I'll dig a little deeper to see where the "/trackback" comes from.

  6. timethief
    Member

    The forum for those who have downloaded software from wordpress.org is here http://wordpress.org/support

  7. drmiketemp
    Member

    A wordpress blog hosted elsewhere gets supported at http://wordpress.org/support These forums here are for those blogs hosted here at wp.com. The wp.org is for support of the wordpress software. These forums are not.

    Your site is currently hosted at site5.com. Would you go to the tech support of AOL or Yahoo or another hosting company if you had an issue with them? That's what you;re doing when you post here. I hope that makes sense to you.

    As to the "/trackback" bit, you may want to rescan my post up above as I explain a bit about it. It's an internal URL used by WordPress for trackbacks. It's not something you need to worry about.

    Good luck to you,
    -drmike

  8. raincoaster
    Member

    The actual software at WordPress.com is different from the software at WordPress.org. They are two different things.

  9. patorjk
    Member

    Your site is currently hosted at site5.com. Would you go to the tech support of AOL or Yahoo or another hosting company if you had an issue with them? That's what you;re doing when you post here. I hope that makes sense to you.

    I actually find your analogies offensive. Mistaking WordPress.org forums for WordPress.com forums isn't the same as mistaking site5 hosting and AOL hosting. I incorrectly assumed that the WordPress.com blogs were similar to what I had (a WordPress blog) and I thought I could get an answer to my "/trackback" question since I figured it would be a common overlap. I had followed the URLs myself so I knew what they were pointing to, I was just curious as to why the "/trackback" was added to the end. I made a mistake by coming here.

    timethief - Thank you for the correct link.

  10. thistimethisspace
    Member

    The simple answer was please go to http://wordpress.org/support and ask your question there.

  11. timethief
    Member

    @patorjk
    No problem. Happy blogging. :)

  12. drmiketemp
    Member

    Sorry that you were offended with my explaination. You seemed to have been not understanding what we were trying to tell you so I tried an analogy in an attempt to explain better to you as well as try to answer your question.

    Good luck to you,
    -drmike

  13. milorad
    Member

    Interestingly junk like this gets indexed and ranked pretty highly like google.

    I've come here a long while after the BS ensued, only to find a bunch of schmos claiming that there's no similarity at all between WordPress MU and WordPress, which frankly is a load of crap.

    This is yet another case of the clueless masses picking on someone in need of help, by focusing on a single tiny reason not to help them.

    If any of you had known the answer, any one of your posts may have taken fewer keystrokes and far less aggravation to actually resolve the problem, but instead you take solace in being technically right, instead of being socially forgiving.

    Nice one. You should be proud of yourselves.

    Now, to answer the question in plenty of detail, for anyone else tripping over this in their Google results:

    ...

    What the OP has seen, and is accustomed to, are called "Pingbacks" which are a WordPress-specific feature that is similar to Trackbacks, but does not require any effort beyond linking someone else's post in your own.

    Trackbacks are compatible with other blogging tools, and the URL they need in order to send you one is http://yoursite.com/d/a/t/e/your-post-title/trackback

    If you try hitting this link manually, it will direct you to your post and remove the /trackback from the end. That doesn't mean that the permalink and the trackback link are the same. The latter with 'trackback' included, is the link users of other blog software will require in order to send you a trackback.

    Now, the reason the OP is seeing lots of trackback hits on his older blog posts is trackback spam. Spammers crawl the web looking for posts they can spam, and the older they are the more likely they are to be indexed extensively.

    Hope that helps the next person along.

  14. mousewords
    Member

    Ahhhhhh, I see! That's why I get so much spam on my very first WordPress post! I was all like---who the heck wants to read THAT dinosaur?? :);)

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