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Linkback

Method of notifications for web authors

A linkback is a method for Web authors to obtain notifications when other authors link to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to, their articles. The four methods (refback, trackback, pingback and webmention) differ in how they accomplish this task.

Overview

"Linkback" is the generalized term used to reference four methods of communication between websites. While sometimes confused with one another, linkbacks and backlinks are not the same type of entity. A backlink is what the person referring to a page creates while a linkback is what the publisher of the page being referred to receives.

Any of the four terms—linkback, trackback, pingback, or (rarely) refback—might also refer colloquially to items within a section upon the linked page that display the received notifications, usually along with a reciprocal link; trackback is used most often for this purpose. Also, the word trackback is often used colloquially to mean any kind of linkback.

Refback	Trackback	Pingback	Webmention
Trigger mechanism	Visitor to linking site clicks on the link, and their browser takes them to the linked site	Code on linking server examines added or updated documents, extracts links, and sends notification to linked server for each link found	Code on linking server examines added or updated documents, extracts links, and sends notification to linked server for each link found
Notification medium	HTTP referrer value	HTTP POST	XML-RPC call
Capture mechanism	Examination of incoming HTTP referrer values	Trackback capture script	XML-RPC function
Information sent by linking server	None
Additional information presented to linked server	HTTP referrer sent by a visitor's browser upon clicking the link	IP address of linking server	IP address of linking server
Autodiscovery mechanism (how the linking server finds out how and where to send the notification)	None	LINK tag in the header of the linked page or trackback RDF documents	Special HTTP header or LINK tag on the linked page
Action required when notification is received
Advantages	Requires no special code on linking server (the link itself becomes the notification when someone clicks on it)	All the information desired by the linked server (Linking site name, post title, excerpt) is present in the notification itself
Disadvantages

References

"Trackback specification draft".
"Webmention Specification".
Constantin, Lucian. (2014-03-11). "Over 160,000 WordPress sites used as DDoS zombies". [[PC World]].

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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