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.
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
-
Will noindex pages still get link equity?
We think we get link equity from some large travel domains to white label versions of our main website. These pages are noindex because they're the same URLs and content as our main B2C website and have canonicals to the pages we want indexed. Question is, is there REALLY link equity to pages on our domain which have "noindex,nofollow" on them? Secondly we're looking to put all these white label pages on a separate structure, to better protect our main indexed pages from duplicate content risks. The best bet would be to put them on a sub folder rather than a subdomain, yes? That way, even though the pages are still noindex, we'd get link equity from these big domains to www.ourdomain.com/subfolder where we wouldn't to subdomain.ourdomain.com? Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | HTXSEO0 -
UTM Links Showing Up as Separate Pages in Google Analytics
Hey everyone, I was just looking at landing pages in Google Analytics, and in addition to just the URL of the landing page, the UTM links are being listed as separate pages. Is this normal? I anticipated seeing the landing page URL and then using the secondary dimension to see source/medium. If this isn't normal, what would I check next?
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
In Google Search Console: Total Clicks differ from the sum clicks on search queries
Hi.This may be a google technical question, but I've searched a lot and I couldn't find any certain information about that.The problem appears when you look at two stats in Search Console ( WebMasters Tools, some months ago), particulary in the Search Analysis.1- Total clicks2- Sum of clicks at every search query.I attached an image to make me clear.8IZsxs6.png
Reporting & Analytics | | NachoRetta2 -
I've seen 4webmasters.org/default.apsx as a referrer, but now it's showing as top page visited
I've seen 4webmasters.org/default.apsx as a referrer, but now it's showing as top page visited. How is this happening and how do I fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Stamats0 -
Ecommerce site product link. How to handle a link that doesn't exist.
Suppose we have this product A, and we just have a single item for this. When the item is sold out we do not want to show it on the website saying "out of stock". Instead we would like to remove the product from out store which will now result in a url that doesn't exist. And google webmaster tool and Moz analytic will show them as page not found after they crawl over the site. Should i be generating a new sitemap.xml and update ? How do i handle those pages that don't exist anymore ? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | MindlessWizard0 -
Moz is showing different "errors" than Webmaster tools
I have set up my Moz campaign and the crawl errors are showing multiple duplicate content and page titles however when I check my webmaster tools data, these errors are not showing up. Is this normal and who should I listen to?
Reporting & Analytics | | LabelMedia0 -
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 -
Site crawler hasn't crawled my site in 6 days!
On 4.23 i requested a site crawl. My site only has about 550 pages. So how can we get faster crawls?
Reporting & Analytics | | joemas990