It wasn’t until Garry Conn had released a post stating that he wants to be #1 in my top referrers list that I realized what would happen after he did so. Once he released his post detailing the first 10 articles on the Blogger.com help series, his blog system contacted my blog system and ultimately created trackbacks on each and every article.

trackbackCommentIf you take a look at any of the first 10 Blogger.com help articles you’ll see a trackback comment that looks like this image here.

NOTE! A trackback is also known as a backlink. As this is what Blogger calls it, I felt it should be noted.

Mind you, I had no idea that his post would do this, and now that it has done it, I should have seen it coming. This does, however, present you with a great opportunity to help me and help yourself as well.

Please note, I was not able to get the trackbacks to work properly from Blogger.com to my install of BlogEngine.net. Even methods of ‘forcing’ the trackback to appear have failed. For those of you who really want to try this out though, I’ve found a page that will walk you through creating trackbacks manually. Albeit my testing has not worked, and it would still be super-duper of anyone to help promote the series regardless. I have tried just about everything I could to get this to work, unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible.

Help Promote the Blogger.com Help Series

If you have enjoyed the series so far, and would like to have your links sprinkled across each of these posts (maybe, see above!), here is what you can do.

Write a post telling your readers about the Blogger.com help series that I am writing on. Within the body of the post, place a reference to each and ever lesson that has been posted so far. Here is how Garry did it within his post:

Here is a complete Blogger.com Help Table of Contents Written by Wayne John:

and soon to come are these following Blogger.com Help Lessons:

  • Modifications and Enhancements
  • Blog Promotion
  • Blog Optimization & Feeds
  • Maintenance and handling growth
  • Making Money from your Blog

UPDATE (11/12/2008) – This series is now complete. If you would like to use the entire Table of Contents you are more than welcome to. We now resume the original post already in progress…

For each link he provided, my blog software gave him what’s known as a trackback comment. A trackback is essentially a comment within my site (or yours too) that tells the me (the blog owner) where a link to the current post is found outside your blog.

The trackback is initiated by the person referring to one of my posts on an external blog. So in the case of most of my readers, it should be Blogger.com that identifies the links in your post and reaches out to other blogs to establish the trackback comments. Since I’ve come to find that Blogger doesn’t actually support this, you will not see any trackbacks. However, other blog systems have support for trackbacks and they will show up on each post that was referenced correctly.

Not only that, but each of those links are also not marked as ‘nofollow’. A ‘nofollow’ link essentially tells search engines not to follow a link, basically ignore it. All these links will be ‘dofollow’ which means you get the greatest benefit from the link that you can get. I’ll need to cover this a bit more in a future post, but realize that it’s a good thing for you. That is of course, until the spam starts to come. Then I will be forced to change things.

Garry Conn is trying to reach number 1 on my referrer’s list, are you going to allow him to beat you out? Let’s help each other and help others even more by introducing the series to other Blogger.com users.