WaratahWeb Blog

Blog Trackbacks and Permalinks Explained
Saturday, May 16, 2009

I'm regularly asked what the Trackback and Permalink links are for underneath a blog post (such as this one!).  Well, here's an explanation and some examples:

Let's start with the "Trackback" link ... in a nutshell, a trackback is a program that will notify the blog owner whenever one of their posts has been linked to from another blog. Here's an example:

Claire writes a post on her blog about "Small Business Tax".  Matthew reads Claire's post and publishes a post on his blog that links to hers.  When Matthew publishes his post, his blog platform goes and talks to Claire's blog platform and says, "We're writing about your post over here on Matthew's blog."

Claire's blog says, "Ok, I'll post the reference."  So on the bottom of Claire's post the blog now adds a link - a Trackback - to Matthew's post talking about "Small Business Tax".

So now in addition to the comments that you might see on a blog post, there can also be a list of other blogs referencing the post, allowing you to visit the other sites and bloggers who are talking about the post.

Now, Permalinks ...

As the name denotes, a Permalink serves as the permanent link of a blog post, so others can link to it for future reference.  For example, let's say that on your website you link back to a post on the WaratahWeb blog, and you do so by simply copying the URL (web address) of my blog page.

However, as time goes by, the post you referenced moves off the front page for the WaratahWeb blog and into the archives. So this means that anyone now clicking on that link on your website, will end up on the blog home page and have to search through the archives to find the post.

Because every post on your blog has its own individual web page, you can click on the Permalink to get the URL of that post's permanent link allowing you to link directly to it.

Hope this helps - happy blogging!