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How To Make Your Trackback Links Visible In Wordpress
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog | April 28, 2008
If you’re not familiar with blog Trackbacks, if you link to a blog using their Trackback URL from your blog, your link shows up as a Comment on their blog (unless they don’t approve your Trackback Comment when you link to them).
- This helps you by getting a link from that site back to you when you link to them through a Trackback
- It helps the other site by providing “social proof” that their blog is popular (because you thought it worthy of linking to)
- It helps the readers of both your and their blogs, by proving them with links in both directions to supplemental content.
So in a nutshell, if you’re linking to another blog from your own blog, you should link using their Trackback URL if they have one.
The problem I ran into is that in Wordpress, a lot of Themes don’t make your Trackback URL visible to readers, which is pretty ridiculous because it’s so beneficial to have.
If your Wordpress blog doesn’t show Track URL’s for each post, here’s how to add them in yourself.
- Log in to your Wordpress Admin Panel
- Click on Presentation => Theme Editor => Single Post
- Scroll down to where the comments area is and add this code:
<a href=”<?php trackback_url(); ?>”>Trackback URL</a> - Click “Save”
- If you want Trackback URL’s to be listed on every post in your main page as well, click on “Main Index Template” in the Theme Editor, and add the same code there as well.
I’ve just done that to this blog. If you want to link to a Wordpress Trackback URL and don’t see their Trackback listed, the default is the URL of the post, with a /Trackback at the end. You can mouse over the Track URL links on this site and compare them to the actual post URL’s to see what I mean.
If you’re unfamiliar with the benefit of Trackbacks, here’s a helpful video by Jack Humphrey
P.S. -It’s always possible to screw something up when you’re editing PHP files like Wordpress Templates, so always have a backup copy of each file before you start tinkering so you can revert back if you “kill it” by accident trying to alter the code. You’ve been warned…
P.P.S. -I have no idea why it seems to be so hard to find info about how to make your Trackback URL visible in your Wordpress Theme, but suffice to say I took one for the team here so you can spend extra quality time with your family tonight, you’re welcome. 
Topics: Marketing | Trackback URL
April 28th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
[...] Making your trackback URL visible in your Wordpress Blog for others to easily link to helps out everyone, but there’s no much info available easily about how to add it to your blog theme, here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to make your Trackback URL visible in Wordpress [...]
April 28th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
[...] netadmin wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIf you’re not familiar with blog Trackbacks, if you link to a blog using their Trackback URL from your blog, your link shows up as a Comment on their blog (unless they don’t approve your Trackback Comment when you link to them). … [...]
May 19th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Hi, Maybe I’m doing something wrong but I’m using Cutline 3 and when I edit my “Main Index Tempate” my link shows up like the following. http://xxx.com/blog/%E2%80%9Dhttp://xxx.com/blog/2008/05/xxx/trackback/%E2%80%9D
Eek!
Is there a solution?
Thanks