What Does This Mean?
A blogging feature that notified one site when another blog post linked to it, so the receiving post could display a link and short excerpt from the linking post. In blog and SEO circles the word is also remembered for the spam it attracted.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
""Your post showed up in my comments through a trackback, but half of the trackbacks on this blog are spam.""
LORE & ORIGIN
According to Wikipedia, Six Apart created the TrackBack specification and first implemented it in Movable Type in August 2002, released it as an open specification (revised to version 1.2 in 2004) and saw it adopted by other content management systems. The notification carries the source URL, title, an excerpt and the blog name. Because trackbacks accepted submitted URLs without authentication, spammers used them to post automated backlinks; Wikipedia cites a 2009 study of one campaign that sent nearly 10 million spam pings in a year. By the 2010s most platforms disabled trackbacks by default or replaced them with pingbacks or Webmentions. This is mainly a technical term rather than slang.
MENTIONS OVER TIME
Radar observation data not yet available for this term.
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