Trackbacks and SEO Leakage

Track back comments just seem like another way for someone to spam my blog. i don’t ever approve any trackback comments. I rarely ever approve any comment that has a link unless the comment and the link is relevant to the topic on my blog.

Why not just use the ‘nofollow’ tags in the trackback links?

Answer to Don.

(1) ‘no follow’ does not help about your post to have dozens of not necessary text under the post.

‘no follow’ makes sure that SEO value is not sent to the page to which you give away the backlink, but that stinky non-value text is still under your post.

(2) ‘no follow’ is too difficult

Don, I know this can sound astonishing that putting ‘no follow’ is difficult, but don’t forget that we are not talking about SEO gurus (otherwise why would they publish trackback comments?).

We have many people coming in who say ‘stop talking about stupid links, I need traffic and you keep talking about building links!’

The learning curve for them is ahead

Summary.

Yes it is possible to use ‘no follow’ and Don is absolutely correct saying that it will stop SEO value leakage. But not approving the trackbacks is simpler.

Both variants are possible.

Thanks so much for posting this. i always switch trackbacks off as they just seem to bring spam – but I was wondering whether that was the right thing to do. Of course you say to allow them but then not approve them. Is that part of WP2.7 as I thought they were automatically approved. IS the only value in receiving them to see where they are coming from?

Thanks FTS. It was a very valuable tip.

Keep up the good work

/Praveen

Answer to Caitlyn Howells:

(1) I am not sure about auto-approval feature in WP 2.7, but if I am not mistaken WP has be default something like ‘comment needs to be moderated before publishing’

(2) And yes, for Free Traffic System and its users the only value to receive them is to see who is giving you one way links.

I assume that it was not the idea for which they have been designed. Most likely this feature was aimed to add to the blogging spirit to see who is talking about you.

But in terms of SEO this turned into a very handy tool for checking one way links from other WP blogs.

Very helpful points – thanks.

Could you explain the difference between a trackback and a pingback and give examples of both, please?

I presume we dont want to display either of these – right?

My guess is that this is a pingback – right?

[...] Lose Weight Is #1 New Year Resolution [...]

I think you are recommending that comments made by real visitors should be manually approved – right?

Thanks in advance,
Gary

Answer to Find Hot Markets – Gary

I would say like this – publishing any outgoing link on your pages means that you are leaking SEO.

You can see that we publish the comments of our users, but we do that because these comments really help to raise discussion and they are up to the point. That is why we are ready to sacrifice SEO for the sake of running an open discussion and thought provoking comments, like yours, for example.

But you do not imagine how much spam comments we are getting, and we simply delete them.

Now about the difference about pingback and trackback. Basically they are about the same: if blog A mentions in its post blog B (and gives URL to blog B!), then blog B receives a notification that “blog A gave a backlink to blog B” – blog B checks if the link is really exisiting. If it exists – the pingback is successful.

There are some nuances about the difference between pingbacks and trackbacks (pingbacks are not that easy to spam, but still “spammable”), but they are not vitally important hence they result in the same thing – a comment pending in the line. Do not approve/publish these comments on your blog, because it is not wise in terms of SEO and informational value for the visitors.

And if you have automatic approval of comments – switch if off instantly. Otherwise you will delude all SEO value from your pages, without getting anything useful in return.

Thanks for that.

So should we just turn off commenting entirely? – so that our visitors cannot leave a comment?

Answer to Find Hot Markets

What we do on this blog – we setup the comments to be always reviewed by moderator. If we see something useful – the comment is approved. All other comments – deleted manually.

Hi,

This explains a lot. I have been getting a lot of trackbacks on my blog after using FTS. But I have a question if you don’t mind.

If all the comments on my blog are disabled, then the trackbacks don’t actually show up on the comment section under any page or blog post. I have a mini website. Until now, I have been approving all the trackbacks, because I didn’t know what they were. I thought they bring link juice.

But since, all the comments are disabled, none of the trackbacks that I approved actually showed up on my website because all the comments were disabled.

So do you think I should go back and unapprove all the trackbacks, or should I just leave it as it is?

Thanks

Great article – have been trying to get my head around trackbacks for a whle but stuggling.

What about trackbacks within our own blog? – where we have linked to the post from another article from our blog. Do we delete these as well (as they are not outgoing).