Ping Trackback

will you use this on your forums

Voted

I'm not quite sure how it could benefit my site.

There's a tutorial included with the feature that displays within your site: http://www.vbseo.com/misc.php?do=pingtrackback (change 'vbseo' for your site name)

I need to know if it will help my forums before I enable it.

That's fine. I just wanted to note that having it on won't hurt either. The feature has been designed to be as non-intrusive as possible and, of course, performance of your forums is not affected by turning it on. Worst case scenario: you (your forum users) will be sending pings every time they link out without even knowing it

There are two excellent reads about ping/trackbacks for forums in the vBulletin SEO forum:

1. rob - Do you think my Mustang site will benefit from the Pingback feature?

Hi!!

As a board owner, you make a very interesting point on behalf of your members, but I feel the comments air more on the side of member negligence.... ie. they don't know what it is.

How many of your members own a blog? I'll bet that some do!

Do a search on google for mustang blog mustang blog - Google Search

Thats not to shabby a number of results.

It's up to us as webmasters to explain the benefits and the in's and outs of trackbacks and pings to our members and I think it's high time someone wrote an FAQ set for us all to add to our boards. This will go a long way toward educating the masses. Once educated then this feature will prove a very very worthy addition to any board... although I must admit, certain industry sectors will make more use of it that others (tech, for instance)

I dont think 'my users dont know what it is' is a suitable reason because like most people, when I get sick of explaining something I add an FAQ item! See my web design forums for FAQ items on the revenue sharing.... or see my football forums for FAQ items on the virtual bookie and the PointShop!

Let's not forget, this feature is two way.... you can chat about things you come across on mustang blogs and gain content relevant links in the process..... whats shabby about that?

2. t2dman - Do you think my Mustang site will benefit from the Pingback feature?

Pingbacks and trackbacks still a new concept

I am real new to pingbacks and trackbacks. I did not know how they worked till vbseo created the vbulletin version of them. I have had my head stuck in vbulletin and have not ventured outside that much.

My point - there will be many like me.

There will definately be a learning curve for people. As more people get vbseo on their forums, more people will be cross linking forums with it. People with blogs will quote forum entries, and so have pings.

Why are blogs good for seo?

Matt Cutts has said a number of times that blogs are good. Why? What is so good about blogs? There is nothing special about a blog per sae, its the technology that is what is good. The tracking/pingback feature is one thing. The community building is another. Many people have personal blogs and have a following of friends that have blogs. With them all linking to each other, you get heaps of links, and links are what any site has to have in order to rank well.

With myspace and flickr sites also getting big, linking to other peoples sites is becoming more common.

Links links links

After vseo and onpage optimization tweaks, links are the missing factor. A PR1 forum with thousands of threads will not get all those pages spidered quickly, nor will those pages once spidered necessarily be included in the index. Without links, the best onpage and vbseo'ed forum will not rank well on Google.

So the trackbacks etc will be an important growing part of getting inbound links and making the forums grow. An important part of community building.

What vbseo has done with the the replacing url's with the title of that page it is linking to - not much benefit to the page that is linking out, but lots of benefit to the page receiving it. Why be good to others??? Because what goes around comes around. Create useful unique content, and see others linking to you via the same trackacks/pingbacks.

I would rather embrace the new technology, and see it get used only a small amount, than miss out on that small amount, and miss out on the potential large amount that could happen.

All it needs is one high PR inbound link and that could be enough to get your page ranked top for a phrase. Thats got to be worth something.

The only performance effect this modification will have on your forum is a surge in traffic from an increase in legimate link exchanges and thus search engine ranking referrals.

True, that could represent a true performance impact Yahoo Slurp bombardment