If you have a WordPress website, you will be familiar with trackbacks appearing in your WordPress CMS dashboard. It’s a great way to know if your site has been cited. But will approving trackbacks on your website improve your site’s SEO performance? Let’s take a look into it.
A trackback is essentially another site linking to your site.
A trackback will notify you that another website has linked to your site. You don’t have to take any further action unless you would like the trackback to appear in the comments section on the linked web page.
Below are some screenshots of some trackbacks that I have received for this blog.
Trackbacks are used alot by web spammers.
The downside with trackbacks is that they are heavily abused by web spammers. Website owners that want to improve their own site’s SEO send pingbacks to sites in the hope that they will be approved, thus earning them a link from the page. Typically, the links are nofollowed. However, web spammers hope to receive links from sites that are dofollowed and that also auto-approve their links.
What’s the benefit of having a legitimate trackback?
An authentic trackback can add credibility to the content that’s published on the web page. For example, a trackback link from say Wordstream would reinforce the credibility of an internet marketing blog post.
Should trackback links be a part of your SEO strategy?
In theory, approving trackback links on your own site won’t benefit your site. However, if your site links out to other sites and receives a trackback link, then it is possible that your site could benefit.
You can link out naturally by citing resources on the web. But getting valuable links from trackbacks would be more of a ‘nice to have’.
If you do notice trackback links to your site, check to make sure they are indexed.
You can ping the linking site’s RSS in order to get the trackback link indexed. You can use a tool like Ping-o-matic.
You can also watch the video discussion below.
Have you ever used trackbacks in an SEO strategy before? What do you think about using them? It would be great to hear your comments in the section below.
You can also click here to learn more about the different white-hat SEO link building strategies.
Thanks for reading.
Join the newsletter
Get updates that will allow you to grow your website's income over the next 12 months.
I’ve never used trackback links personally but I’ve hear some buzz about them in the SEO community lately so I’m doing some research into them to see if I can use them to my advantage. I think GSA would make this process much faster because it would virtually be doing all the work for you. Scrapping sites, submitting comment, etc. Once people find out about things like this and abuse them Google is quick to come in a slap anyone do it so I would definitely be careful with this tactic. Great article, I’ll definitely be back for more. Thanks!
Hi Dillon. Thank you for your comment. And I agree with what you’ve said. 🙂
I have gotten a lot of trackbacks from large websites, and finally my posts are listed according to the trackback url, is the impact good for SEO?
Hi Devoyage. Thank you for your message. It will be better for driving traffic to your website from those other sites. The benefit may not be from the direct linking, but from people being able to discover your site and also the credibility with other site’s linking to your website.
I hope that this helps.