Introducing Backlinks

'Links to this post' is Bloggers latest feature and you can see it at the bottom of this message next to the comment's link. In theory, sites that are linking to this post (via the permalink URL) will be displayed together with the comments when we press such a link. In practice, the links that will appear are only from sites that are searched by and indexed by Google. Since Google doesn't crawl blogs very often there will be a delay before the link appears. And since bloggers are used to work in real time, that is a problem.

Then again, not even the excellent Technorati pick up links instantly; they suffer from delays as well, presumably it is difficult to catch up with all the new blogs that appear on the Internet every second. On the other side, Trackback, such as provided by Haloscan and used on this blog, works in an instant. That is, when it works. All too often a ping is returned with an error message. Typically, 'you are pinging too fast.' Eh? Pinging my links to two sites within ten minutes is too fast? Another drawback is that it is not 'automatic,' filling in the ping forms is a pain and it takes time. Perhaps that's why this site haven't received a ping in several months? {smile}

Anyway, we are bloggers and we're growing with the technology and the technology is growing with us, so let's give it a go. My Backlink is installed and when I've tweaked everything I'll post a few URL's with Backlinks if you want to see how the results are displayed. To learn more, visit Blogger's Buzz. Unless you have changed your template very recently, you'll have to add the code manually. The help article has a link of how to do it, but it didn't work very well for me. I sent off a message and a few hours later this night the article was taken down, the link now says 'not yet written.' Perhaps too many bloggers sounded an alert. I bet they are working on it!

When you have installed the code, remember to republish the whole blog. Unfortunately, I got stuck with the August archive again so I had to switch over to the weekly archiving; it works but doesn't look good. Keep an eye on A Consuming Experience (Improbulus) also; she will be the first with the how-to on the latest, as always! (She will also tell you how to index your site on Google sitemaps, without the headaches).