Trackbacks vs Links: What's the Difference?
-
Our Google Analytics social pages report isn't showing several of our links. And several links are from high quality sources, such as about.com. Does anyone know why this may be?
-
Well said: "a trackback is essentially a notification of a link to your content from an external source." hear hear
-
Michelleh - while you got insight into what trackbacks are, I can offer this regarding why GA isn't showing some of those links.
Unfortunately, no analytics system is 100% accurate or complete, not even Google's. It's possible that if they're new or recent, they will eventually show up in GA reports, however it's not guaranteed.
That does NOT mean you don't get SEO linking value for them, only that reporting systems are imperfect AND Google's intent is to show " a sampling" even though they don't make that abundantly clear in a way most people would even know that's their stance.
If you want to get more insight into Google's Sampling methods, you can read about theme in the Google Developer site here.
-
I was just about to type that! Beat me to it Keri : )
Michelle - a trackback is essentially a notification of a link to your content from an external source. Hope that helps!
-
Hi Gigs20,
It looks like what you wrote is directly from Google's announcement at http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/05/expanding-google-analytics-social.html. In Q&A, please list your sources, and make it clear when you're saying something from your own experience versus quoting someone else.
Thanks!
-
The concept of trackbacks, a protocol by which different sites could notify each other of referencing links, first emerged back in 2002. Since then, the blogosphere has grown in leaps and bounds, but the requirement for each site to explicitly implement this protocol has always stood in the way of adoption. Many are not familiar with Trackbacks, just think of it as automated Google Alerts for all of your pages: you publish new content, Google scour the web for pages that link to it and build automated reports for you right within Google Analytics - simple as that.
These reports provide another layer of social insight showing which of your content attracts links, and enables you to keep track of conversations across other sites that link to your content. Most website and blog owners had no easy mechanism to do this in the past, but Google see it as another important feature for holistic social media reports. When you know what your most linked content is, it is then also much easier to replicate the success and ensure that you are building relationships with those users who actively link to you the most.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Submitted URL marked 'noindex'
Search Console is giving this issue for near 100 pages of my website. I have checked the Yoast plugin settings. We haven't used any meta robots tag for these pages, neither have these pages been disallowed in robots.txt. Previosuly this issue was for some 20+ pages. I tried to reindex them by submitting the urls again. Now the count has risen to 100+. There is also this "Submitted URL blocked by robots.txt" issue for pages which are NOT disallowed in robots.txt. Can anyone please suggest me a solution here?
Reporting & Analytics | | Reema240 -
On Google Analytics, Pages that were 301 redirected are still being crawled. What's the issue here?
URL that we redirected are being crawled on Google Analytics. Since they dont exist, they have high bounce rates. What can the issue be?
Reporting & Analytics | | prestigeluxuryrentals.com0 -
Why doesn't Google seem to care about referral spam?
In researching the issue of referral spam, there is no shortage if info, both on MOZ and beyond. But, neither the Google Analytics Blog or Help Forums seem to mention the issue at all. I'd think it is something that they would want to get rid of, yet it seems like they don't even acknowledge that it exists. Anyone have insights into this? Am I missing something, or is Google strangely silent on an issue that is becoming more and more annoying for anyone trying to use GA data?
Reporting & Analytics | | irapasternack1 -
Difference between External Followed Links and Total External Links?
Hello, could someone please elaborate on what is meant by "External Followed Links" vs. "Total External Links"? Does "External Followed Links" mean the number of links that are generating traffic to the site? Or is there some other way to conceptualize it? Any help would be appreciated! Thank you in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | lincolndigitalgroup1 -
Links from PA/DA of 1
My immediate thought is that a link from a website that has a PA/DA of 1 for both or either metric would be absolutely worthless, but I just wanted to make sure. Could this also be from it being recently indexed? Also is there a rule of thumb that anybody knows, or tries to follow at least? Obliviously the higher the better, but for example; A PA/DA of 15 and below is SPAM A PA/DA of 30 and above is GOOD A PA/DA of 50 is GREAT PA/DA of 80 is AMAZING PA/DA of 100 is GODTIER
Reporting & Analytics | | HashtagHustler0 -
Any harm and why the differences - multiple versions of same site in WMT
In Google Webmaster Tools we have set up: ourdomain.co.nz
Reporting & Analytics | | zingseo
ourdomain.co.uk
ourdomain.com
ourdomain.com.au
www.ourdomain.co.nz
www.ourdomain.co.uk
www.ourdomain.com
www.ourdomain.com.au
https://www.ourdomain.co.nz
https://www.ourdomain.co.uk
https://www.ourdomain.com
https://www.ourdomain.com.au As you can imagine, this gets confusing and hard to manage. We are wondering whether having all these domains set up in WMT could be doing any damage? Here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231 it says: "If you see a message that your site is not indexed, it may be because it is indexed under a different domain. For example, if you receive a message that http://example.com is not indexed, make sure that you've also added http://www.example.com to your account (or vice versa), and check the data for that site." The above quote suggests that there is no harm in having several versions of a site set up in WMT, however the article then goes on to say: "Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead." This suggests that having multiple versions of the site loaded in WMT may cause Google to continue crawling multiple versions instead of only crawling the desired versions (https://www.ourdomain.com + .co.nz, .co.uk, .com.au). However, even if Google does crawl any URLs on the non https versions of the site (ie ourdomain.com or www.ourdomain.com), these 301 to https://www.ourdomain.com anyway... so shouldn't that mean that google effectively can not crawl any non https://www versions (if it tries to they redirect)? If that was the case, you'd expect that the ourdomain.com and www.ourdomain.com versions would show no pages indexed in WMT, however the oposite is true. The ourdomain.com and www.ourdomain.com versions have plenty of pages indexed but the https versions have no data under Index Status section of WMT, but rather have this message instead: Data for https://www.ourdomain.com/ is not available. Please try a site with http:// protocol: http://www.ourdomain.com/. This is a problem as it means that we can't delete these profiles from our WMT account. Any thoughts on the above would be welcome. As an aside, it seems like WMT is picking up on the 301 redirects from all ourdomain.com or www.ourdomain.com domains at least with links - No ourdomain.com or www.ourdomain.com URLs are registering any links in WMT, suggesting that Google is seeing all links pointing to URLs on these domains as 301ing to https://www.ourdomain.com ... which is good, but again means we now can't delete https://www.ourdomain.com either, so we are stuck with 12 profiles in WMT... what a pain.... Thanks for taking the time to read the above, quite complicated, sorry!! Would love any thoughts...0 -
My GA code is on my site but Google Analytics isn't being pulled into SEOMoz...why?
The CEO wants me to present an SEO plan next week for three of our sites; however, I got this message when I went to campaign overview tab: "It appears there's a problem with our connection to your Google Analytics account. Please go to your Settings page to update your connection." I double-checked the GA code and it's the same on both our site and in SEOMoz...what gives? I clicked on Choose Your GA Profile->Set GA Account and Profile then got this warning: "Are you sure you want to change your Google Analytics connection? Changing your connection will reset our cache of your historical GA traffic data." I need this data pronto so I can set strategy for three sites; any help would be greatly appreciated! Darrell
Reporting & Analytics | | AdviceElle0 -
Internal Links not Showing Up
Hi, I have a wordpress blog at www.learnbonds.com. I am looking through open site explorer and and showing only 9 internal links on my report. I have hundreds of internal links on the site so I am wondering why they are not showing up? Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks Dave
Reporting & Analytics | | fxtrader19790