Saturday, October 08, 2005

Backlinks

Via Blogger Buzz, I learn that Blogger now has backlinks (a.k.a. trackback). Whenever you link to one of my posts, a reciprocal "backlink" will automatically appear below my post (just above the comments section), just as soon as Google's blogsearch picks up on it. It's very convenient. I don't know if mine is working yet though, so if anyone cares to test it... ;)

Update: It's working! See here for an example. I especially like how it also creates backlinks when I link to my own previous posts (which I tend to do a lot) -- it keeps my blog well interconnected without my having to manually update the old posts. I highly recommend this feature to other Blogger users out there! (You might find the help page on backlink tags to be useful when editing your template.)

Update 2: There's a bug which means if you view a backlinks-enabled blog in Firefox, you won't be able to select text (e.g. to copy and paste).

Update 3: You can fix this bug by disabling backlinks in your blog's "settings", but then installing this Browservulsel hack to provide backlinks instead.

8 comments:

  1. I just set up a link to this post. now it depends on google. we will see.

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  2. Richard, obviously, that backlinks-thing doesn't work very well. My weblog sent the trackback pings, that is sure. But perhaps it is because I have no blogger-weblog?

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  3. I'm not sure what the problem is. It should include any blog that is indexed by Google's blogsearch -- i.e. any blog with an atom/rss feed that automatically pings weblogs.com upon updating. Does your blog do that? Otherwise, it might just be a bit slow. (Though I notice that a backlink to this post has now appeared on the Blogger Buzz as linked above.) Possibly there's something wrong with my template? I'll wait and see...

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  4. P.S. note that the way Blogger backlinks work is by doing an automatic Google blogsearch for links, rather than the usual device of trackback pings (since the latter can be manipulated by spammers who never really linked to your post in the first place). So it all depends on how long it takes the search engine to discover and index new pages.

    In fact, checking the blogsearch results for this page, it looks like Google simply hasn't found your link yet. Hopefully that'll change soon.

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  5. Hey, it works. Unfortunately, now I'll know that nobody links to me...

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  6. I've linked to your post. I hope you'll help me test this feature on my blog!

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  7. I know this is an old post but thanks. I love how your comment/backlink section looks. Very clean. :)

    I am going to try the hack you suggested and see if just maybe the backlinks show on my own blog. They show on other blogs - just not mine so I assume it may be my template or maybe the Blogger code from the Blogger site.

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