Who's been linking to my website? - on trackbacks and Technorati
Posted 22 March 2007 at 10:04AM by Simon Dickson in Managing your website
The web has always been about connections. Initially it was a one-way thing, with Site A linking to Site B. These days, there's a thing called 'trackback' which completes the circle.
Originally invented in 2002 by the people behind the Movable Type blog publishing system (which we use here), a trackback is basically a signal from my website to yours, telling you that I've linked to you. Depending on what tools you use, your website can then collate a list of all the sites which link to it. You often see lists of trackbacks at the bottom of blog entries, sometimes integrated into the comments.
Trackbacks are a great idea in theory, but in practice you won't often see much use being made of them. They are a bit cumbersome to use, requiring a couple of extra clicks to make the connection - and a growing number of sites are choosing to disable them altogether.
It's easy to understand why, when you hear of sites like Newsbreak in the Philippines, which was suddenly hit with over 27,000 trackback links to pornographic webpages, forcing the site offline. 'We assure our readers that we are raising the level of our site security,' the editors meekly note. (I can sympathise; I had a few ugly trackbacks to remove over the weekend, although nothing like on that scale.)
'Newcomers to blogging may find their blog hammered with nuisance comments and unwanted trackbacks which point to online drugstores, pornographic websites or bogus financial advice,' warns Graham Cluley of security specialists Sophos. 'It's not uncommon for bloggers to find the vast majority of the trackbacks they receive are from spammers. It's a shame that a cool technology like trackback should be so widely abused.'
As an alternative, you might want to follow the example of the Guardian's discussion website, Comment Is Free. Every article on their site includes a link to leading blog search engine Technorati, to show which blogs (if any) are currently linking to a given page.
If you're comfortable dealing with code, it's very easy to set this up. It's just a normal web link, pointing to 'http://www.technorati.com/search/' followed by the address of the page in question - which you should be able to call dynamically using your publishing system's template tags. In Movable Type (or Typepad), it should be $MTEntryPermalink$; in WordPress, it'll be the_permalink();.
So for example, if you want to find links to http://www.example.com/page.html, you want to end up with a link to http://www.technorati.com/search/http://www.example.com/page.html. Don't worry about the duplicate http; it'll work fine.
Tags: blog metadata, movable type, spam, technorati, trackback, wordpress
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