At its core, my first impression of SocialRank niche websites was that it was little more than a WordPress splog scraping my content based upon keywords used and giving some kind of relevant or irrelevant ranking based upon some internal algorithm.

It is still my content appearing on a 3rd party site, in the same way as one of the millions of kubrik themed sites that just grab keyword based feeds from Technorati.

As I have said in the past, I license my content as GPL, so am quite happy for people to repurpose it, and hopefully if they provide a link a little traffic finds it’s way back to my site.

There is however one thing I absolutely detest

Don’t Use Pingback / Trackback When Syndicating / Splogging My Content

If you site contains no original content, if you are not entering the “blogging conversation”, I don’t want you to spam the hell out of me with trackbacks and pingbacks.
I sent an email to SocialRank to switch off the pinging, the pinging continued with my email box full of ping notifications. All I received in response to my email was an invite to their beta.

Would you join the beta of a company effectively hiting you with trackback/pingback spam?

I don’t see them anymore, I have told Spam Karma to blacklist them just like any of the other splogs.

On the other hand I read today an interview Ben did with SocialRank.

This seems similar to the Quechup debacle at the beginning of last month where an over enthusiastic viral referral system effectively destroyed the social network before it gained any traction. The first page of results in Google only mention negative things about Quechup – I assume they rebranded.

I never accepted an invite to Quechup, but I assume within the terms and conditions somewhere they gave some notification that when you provide your friend’s details, they would automatically send email invites. Thus the emails probably weren’t spam, and looking back through the few emails I received, were not to my knowledge in any way illegal, with a clear opt-out option, company details, a nice link through to a company privacy policy etc. In fact iDate who own Quechup issued a press release 2 weeks ago explaining the changes made to the feature to stop people making mistakes when inviting people.

I think the problem comes with people so used to how Facebook and LinkedIn have implemented these in my opinion quite dangerous address book sharing features, they assume every site works the same way, even if the other site actually had a similar but different feature well before LinkedIn and Facebook. The iDate press release mentions having this feature since 2005.

With SocialRank it is different. They are the ones filling my email box with pingback after pingback proclaiming that they scraped my content.

I don’t regard them as a stinking splog, they are still linking back to the original source with a followable link, but currently they are more annoying than Quechup invites just 1 month ago.

When I link to a Wordperss blog, most of the time I can just use pingback which autodiscovers the trackback URL for any blog I link to within a post and sends a trackback to the blog owner.

On some WordPress blogs they have removed the pingback code to reduce spam. Fair enough I enter a trackback URL if I want to give them a signal that I have written something that might be worth their while reading.

On Blogger there are now linkbacks powered by Google blogsearch, so you can tell who has linked to you. A Blogger user can also send a trackback using a convenient script.

If I am sending a trackback to many other blogging platforms, I normally have to grab a specific trackback URL from their posts. It is a little inconvenient, but I still do it.

Typepad & Moveable Type Users – Are You Whispering About Me?

That is what it seems like anyway…

Typepad & Moveable Type blogs can receive trackbacks, so I am sure they are meant to be able to send them as well, maybe with auto detection but I have a feeling they don’t offer that functionality.

So you probably have to send a trackback manually filling in a field in your posting form. I am not going to register with Typepad just to write a tutorial on how to do it, but I would gladly link to one.

Having just done a search, I couldn’t find a simple tutorial teaching people how to send a trackback from Typepad to different blogging platforms. It seems like a no-brainer article to have on the first page of results.

So please someone write a tutorial so I can link to it

This blog post was inspired by Amy, maybe she will write a great tutorial. She was lucky I saw her link in Technorati, but I am sure I miss half the times people link to me, either because they link to my domain rather than my content, or because they don’t send trackbacks.

Alternatively one of Mikes students should do it, or maybe lots of people. Mike has to rest even though he is back home, so I refuse to link to him if he writes it.

We are looking for a comprehensive write-up with screenshots.

Install Greasemonkey

Lots of people might have it already and I know 65% of my readers use Firefox. If you don’t have it already, it is extremely useful, and there are thousands of user scripts for it.

Install Blogger Trackback

After you have Greasemonkey installed, install the appropriate script – the developer says both can co-exist, but I haven’t tested that.

If you are using New Blogger, you can use this trackback script for greasemonkey.

If you are using old blogger, there is an older script available

Trackback In Blogger

I think the picture near enough says it all

Yes that is a box within the Blogger interface where you just add a trackback URL.

After you publish, you even get a nice confirmation that it was sent

Del.icio.us

The script also pops up a window for your Delicious details, and tags your posts.

Pingoat & Pingomatic

Yep, it is meant to work with Pingoat and Pingomatic as well, though when I tested with Pingoat following the instructions, I didn’t see any additional visual confirmation. I didn’t test Pingomatic.

I am not 100% sure this part worked for me, I need to do some more testing

Good But No Banana… yet!

It isn’t a perfect solution as is, because it is using the blog name for the link URL on the receiving end, rather than the blog post title.
It should be possible to hack the Greasemonkey script to use your post title, so that it uses the post title for links on the receiving end.

I will see what I can do to get a modified version made available

In this first part of this quick series, I am going to cover Haloscan.

Create A Haloscan Account

First of all you need to register with Haloscan.

You do not need to integrate Haloscan with your blog to use their trackback system

I would actually currently advise you not to integrate Haloscan for comments and trackback display on your blog for a number of reasons.

• Blogger can now display linkbacks
• You can remove nofollow from the trackback links on blogger
• It is harder to migrate to WordPress or other blogging platform if all your comments are in Haloscan.

Send Trackback With Haloscan

It is important that links actually exist, and in this particular case when this post is published a link will exist, otherwise comment spam plugins might intercept the trackback.

There is also what I would look on as a bug with Haloscan, they use the blog title as the link for the trackback, and not the post name. The blog post title appears in bold above the trackback. Knowing this you can make sure you have some keywords for a good link by including them in the blog title rather than the post title, though the text entry field is quite small.

This is how a trackback appears on my blog below the comments box.

So if you are using Blogger, or a blogging platform that doesn’t seem to send trackbacks correctly, Haloscan is one option you can use to send a trackback.

From what I have read on the pre-release materials, it sends trackback notifications to create one-way links to your website.

That means:-

• You are not being referenced on the site sending the trackback
• You are not being linked to by the site sending the trackback

This is Blackhat, lots of tools have been available for this kind of thing in the past, and this kind of software is actually fairly unpopular even among most shady web masters.

Fortunately it is not very effective on active blogs for a number of reasons.

• It is becoming much harder to monetise sites which are using trackback spam. Bloggers tend to be quite vocal and keen to report such sites to Google.
• Blogspot uses linkbacks – even splogs have to reciprocate a link – Google should really provide a way to moderate linkbacks.
• WordPress has a number of good solutions to handle trackback spam – my favorite is Spam Karma which always checks for a reciprocal link, and my installation also has quite a growing blacklist.
• Most bloggers who receive a trackback actually check them

There might be some minor success on old abandoned WordPress blogs, and maybe abandoned blogs on other formats, but those generally are low quality, and fairly low traffic.

So even if you want to wear a black hat, this type of tool is becoming more and more useless daily.

Disclosure: I do have some past history with the developer, as I purchased Domain Dashboard his previous product, and whilst many people were satisfied, I have never managed to get Domain Dashboard working consistently for all my domains, the product hasn’t been updated for months, and support was unresponsive.
I didn’t ask for a refund – if the product had worked with my various hosting plans, it would have saved me a huge amount of time daily. Maybe in the future it will, because I am thinking about moving a lot of my hosting.

I don’t think there is much of a legitimate market for this new product. Most people I know who dabble on the dark side already have similar solutions, and those who I would look on as “grey hat” don’t dabble with this kind of trackback spam.

When I checked on Wednesday due to timezones it hadn’t been published yet, Thursday I was so buried in code, themes and plugins I didn’t spot it being published (yes I need more vanity Google Alerts), and so I am linking through to it today.

One thing it definitely highlights is the advantage of real genuine trackbacks over Technorati.
Technorati shows I have gained 4000 links in the last 3 months, and the number is escalating, mainly as Technorati find more and more additional feeds and blogroll links.

Google need to provide a decent trackback function with Blogger. You can use a 3rd party such as Haloscan, but that is very inconvenient. Maybe someone needs to create a service “I will ping your blogger” which subscribes to a blogspot feed, and sends feed notifications.
If you use Blogger and have found a good solution to trackbacks, please share that information in the comments.

So anyway, one thing I really like about Marty is that each interview he conducts asks different questions to prior interviews. It is not like he is using a template and sending it to 20 bloggers to create the content for a month.

Did I reveal any secrets? Possibly, Marty asked me questions I had never thought about in the past – the answers will certainly tell you a little more about me.

If your blog doesn’t trackback, I am less inclined to link to you and join your conversation. I might just comment, but that doesn’t send my readers to see what you wrote either.

I know you will make the excuse that you have a busy blog, and get lots of trackback spam, but an aweful lot of those trackbacks are part of the conversation, and your own readers are missing out.

If you are using Spam Karma on WordPress, the majority of trackbacks that get through are real comments, and a few might be people using your content – you can always delete the trackback and block the site if they are abusing the facility.

Hiding the autodiscovery for trackback away is just an insular approach. It is honestly a pain to have to copy and paste a second URL, or remember to stick /trackback/ on the end of the URLs on some WordPress sites.

Oh, and talking of trackback, I need to link to Irish in Denmark – this is actually part of an experiment with Google Bombing, and something else to prove a point that is highly valid and deserves some attention. I know exactly what is going on, and encourage others to link through to Paul using the same anchor text “Irish in Denmark”.

It should be noted that Paul doesn’t use nofollow on his trackbacks, so you receive a live link probably from another DNS C-Block. If you write a post about trackbacks as I have done, it is even a link that is LSI related.

I put this in the memes category, it isn’t really a meme as such, but it effectively works in the same way as a meme.

I am going to test the nobumpzee flag with this post as well

It is actually quite a sterile look on the practice, and doesn’t mention one important concept.

Community

Rand asks

Has anyone ever actively pursued this technique? Any success? I know it’s worked on us – I’ll link back to someone who linked to SEOmoz with a good idea or suggestion or topic; when it’s done right, it doesn’t seem like spam or marketing at all – just good inter-site dialogue.

My answer:-

I think every notable blogger peruses this technique, unless they are running a sterile corporate blog.

As an example supporting the Z-list meme meant I gave a lot of blogs some link love, but at the same time, many of the bloggers I linked to have visited my blog, and maybe a couple subscribed.

Another example was my support of WordPress Tutorials when they were having trademark problems.

When I took Robert Scoble to task on his promotion of Google Reader, I experienced a significant surge in traffic from his post, but very little of it stayed around as subscribers, or even read my first post on the subject.

Insular vs Community

I have written about my community aims for this blog in the past. This blog is an experiment in running a community based blog on internet and niche marketing. Most such blogs are very insular, with the aim to retain customers rather than be part of the blogging community.

In many ways it is an interesting experiment, because the views of an internet marketer in many ways are the opposite of bloggers, who don’t like being sold to.
My opinions are often quite the opposite of many A-list bloggers, as my commentary on subjects like PayPerPost have proven. I haven’t been dragged over the coals by anyone, but such views don’t attract link love.

The same can be true of my Disclosure Policy Plugin. Because it provides a solution to the controversy of disclosure on blogs, hardly anyone is giving the plugin any link love.

Trackback or Comment

Unfortunately in my experience, trackbacks in general bring in less traffic than a well timed comment, unless a blog is setup to emphasise trackbacks and you get in very early.

This blog is setup to encourage trackbacks. Trackbacks gain a followable link as do comments.

Thus you should provide copy and paste linking.

There is an easy way to do this with the Link to Me Textbox plugin – I did however add a few tweaks to the code to make it display correctly and “future proof” it.

First of all for the link in the template you have to add they suggest you use

<?php link_to_me_textbox(''); ?>

Instead I used something much safer

<?php if (function_exists('link_to_me_textbox')) link_to_me_textbox(''); ?>

It is important to add plugins in this way, otherwise if you switch off the plugin, you might break your blog them until you edit your templates again.

Secondly I modified the CSS by adding the following lines

height: 60px;
min-height: 60px;
width: 450px;

This post discusses why there are 2 references to height in the CSS as an IE workaround.

I would prefer the CSS to be in a seperate file, or stored in the database, and automatically inserted in the header by the plugin for many of my niche sites, and an option to do the same with the actual code in the comments.