A Reminder Again On Trackbacks

We’re getting an awful lot of trackbacks again that are from sites that haven’t linked to our posts. Although we love reading posts (and we love reading all sides) it’s common knowledge that trackbacks are supposed to be sent to let a site you haved linked to know that you have linked to them.

When we do our Around the ‘Sphere we link to a lot of sites and if they have trackback capability send each a trackback. On other posts we don’t trackback anyone else’s site unless we link to them in our post. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Trackbacks really are not supposed to be a way for people to link to whatever site they want. And it’s also self-defeating: I was going to link to a post yesterday that I really liked, but then saw I got a trackback on it to my site on it — and they had not linked to me. So I figured that if they linked without my permission, in this case I’d leave the trackback there, and there was no need to add them to the roundup (they were already on my site) on the main page.

This is a friendly and polite reminder. We’re leaving the ones that were sent to us without having been linked to us up there. But as of 3:27 p.m. San Diego time today we will delete ALL trackbacks that don’t link to our posts…just as we would fully expect others would delete ours if we just linked to them by sending trackbacks when we had not linked to their posts. Gracias!