What are backlinks and how do I use them?
The Quick Answer
- Backlinks display other webpages that link to your posts.
- To enable backlinks on your blog go to your Settings | Posts and comments tab and select Show
What are backlinks?
Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that
link to your posts. For instance, suppose Alice writes a blog entry that
Bob finds interesting. Bob then goes to his own blog and writes a post
of his own about it, linking back to Alice's original post. Now Alice's
post will automatically show that Bob has linked to it, and it will
provide a short snippet of his text and a link to his post. What it all
works out to is a way of expanding the comment feature such that related
discussions on other sites can be included along with the regular
comments on a post.
How to use backlinks
The backlinks setting can be found under the
Settings | Posts and Comments tab, and consists of a single, simple option to turn it on or off:
Our default templates are already set up with the necessary code for
backlinks. However, if you have a custom template, or one of our
templates from before this feature was launched, you will need to add
the code yourself.
Instructions for that are here.
Once everything is set up, you'll see a new link marked "Links to
this post" next to the comment link for each post. If you click that
link you'll be taken to the post page, where the backlinks are all
listed beneath the comments. Clicking the triangles next to each link
will display a snippet of text from the page linking to you, as well as
some author and date information.
If you want to turn off backlinks for individual posts, you can do
so. The process is the same as that for turning off comments. Just edit
the post in question and change the options that appear in the
Post Settings section:
Notes:
- For the curious, this feature is based on the
link: operator of Blog Search.
So sites linking to your blog will need to be indexed by Blog Search
and there may be a slight delay before the backlinks appear on your
blog.
- The comment notification email setting does not apply to
backlinks, so you will not be notified of new links when they appear.
This is because these links are looked up on-the-fly each time you view
an individual post.
- In lieu of comment notification, you can use Blog Search with a query such as
link:your-blog-here.blogspot.com, and then subscribe to the results. That will have a similar effect.
