Trackbacks and pingbacks

[MonsterWeb28]

In seomoz pro campaign it is coming up with an error saying that all my trackbacks on my clients blog are 302 and badish. Should I disable trackbacks and pingbacks to avoid this warning or will it hurt my seo?

[RyanKent]

I think that is a wise choice. If you later decide to add that type of social sharing to your site, I have had good experiences with AddThis.

[MonsterWeb28]

Hey Ryan,

Thanks again for your help. This appears to be a WP Plugin called "AddtoAny" which is a Social Sharing Plugin with links to all the networks for sharing. I have never really liked this plugin so I'm disabling it and going to set up the newest tweet like and +1 buttons.

Again,

Thanks.

[RyanKent]

Your facebook iframe is clearly visible in the source code. It contains about a dozen links which, due to the manner in which the iframe is presented, are not visible to crawlers. The facebook iframe is also clearly identified. I have no concerns about the Like box.

The issue I am referring to concerns an additional iframe which appears at the top of the page code. The iframe is called "a2apage" which I can only guess refers to a name provided by the code developer. It seems to offer links to over 100 social sites such as facebook, windows live, sphinn and many others.

Mozbar No follow.jpg
mozbar No follow in Iframe.jpg

[MonsterWeb28]

The iframe in question would be the Facebook Like Box. The the links are to the peoples profiles it seems. I believe this to be pretty harmless.

Thanks for the information about the 302's and wordpress.

[RyanKent]

I would also like to add there is a serious concern with your site which should be addressed. Your home page shows 237 internal links. The overwhelming majority of those links are not visible to users.

The specific URL you referenced above shows 56 internal followed links, and 128 internal nofollow links on the page. The nofollow links are all hidden and don't seem to offer any value to your site nor it's visitors. These links are potentially a huge waste of your PR.

I recommend you remove any link from a page which is not visible, and ensure all links are helpful to users.

I would like to extend thanks to Nick from the SEOmoz help desk for pointing out these links were hidden in an iframe. I normally view HTML code using View Page Source which did not show the iframe. By using FireBug Nick was able to show me the nofollow links which were hidden, and taught me another trick to discover hidden links.

[RyanKent]

It seems WP uses a 302 by default. An article which can help: http://yoast.com/google-wordpress-and-trackback-urls/

[MonsterWeb28]

http://cadenlane.com/blog/2010/03/16/caden-lane-big-kid-rooms/trackback/ redirects to http://cadenlane.com/blog/2010/03/16/caden-lane-big-kid-rooms/

It seems that the WP Blog is automatically creating these 302's as I haven't configured this.

[RyanKent]

302s are designed as temporary redirects. Prior to adding a 302 to your site, ask yourself how many hours will the 302 be in place. While there is not any exact answer, I can't think of a reason to use a 302 which will be in place for 30+ days.

(This is a perfect opportunity for someone to share a corner case of an example where it was appropriate ^^)

I wouldn't recommend disabling pingbacks and trackbacks. There are a meaningful tool. I am not clear of the purpose of your use of the redirect in this case. Can you share an example URL from your site which uses this method?