Laurence Simon and Bill Quick are launching a campaign against TrackBack abuse–the use of Movable Type’s TrackBack feature to garner attention and traffic for one’s site without actually providing a reciprocal link to the originating site. Susanna Cornett mentioned her annoyance at the practice last May, which was the first I’d heard of it.
For non-bloggers–and some bloggers for that matter, judging from the comments on Bill’s post–this seems like a rather silly issue. But, as Laurence rightly notes, reciprocity is a key feature of the “code” bloggers live by. I’ve had an announced policy of deleting such TrackBacks for months.
The strange thing about all of this is that it doesn’t cost anything to give up links to other bloggers! To take the most obvious example, Glenn Reynolds—who runs a fairly popular site called “InstaPundit” for you new readers—links roughly 700 other sites a day and yet still manages to get many links for himself. It’s not a zero sum game.
