PDA

View Full Version : Permalinks, linkbacks and trackbacks


Saab Dastard
7th Jul 2008, 17:53
As you may or may not be aware, IB have implemented these recently.

Here's the explanation from IB admin which is quite helpful (vBSEO is the Search Engine Optimisation add-in for the vBulletin software the site runs on):

Essentially the simple explanation of linkbacks and trackbacks is that whenever a website links to another website there are potential benefits that go to both the "linked to" site and the "linked from" site. These benefits come in the form of "trust" as measured by the search engines. As trust increases, with the help of "quality" links, sites will rise in the search results. However, if the links are not "quality" (especially those that go out from a site -- read: spam links) then trust can be diminished.

Because links are important to search engine optimization ("seo") many people who own sites want to see which links are coming in and which are going out. They want to see this so that they can control the "trust" factor. Because of this vBSEO put in place the ability to track these links.

This feature also helps to promote links to come back into a site using a quid pro quo type of philosophy. Whenever someone from a site links out to another site, by placing the url of the link into the "Trackbacks" box, this feature will send a little message to that site saying "hey we linked to you". It does this in the hopes of getting a link back from that destination site.

Since we launched this feature a few weeks back we've seen almost a 30% jump in traffic coming to PPruNe from Google. There could be a lot of reasons for this jump but we have to believe that improving our rankings on search results, with the help of vBSEO, is one of the factors.

Permalinks are actually the most important part of the vBSEO plugin. What they do is essentially to create urls that are descriptive in nature. Prior to launching this feature, PPruNe's urls would have looked something like:
www.pprune.org/forums/thread=4228686 or something like that. Essentially not very interesting. Now they include the name of the thread in them rather than just a number. This is important because the search engines look at url structure to determine context of the information on the page. If the url is simply a number, there is no context, but if the url has words in it, then Google has an idea as to what that page is about.

SD