I saw over at Stop the ACLU that the TTLB Ecosystem is preparing to (or perhaps already has) eliminate trackbacks from its ranking scheme. Don Surber has a bit more of the info, but basically NZ Bear has said he is working out a way to eliminate 'open trackbacks' from being counted.
I guess I can kind of see why he would do this. An open trackback party does inflate a blog's rankings somewhat artificially. I know I've looked at my standing in the ecosystem and then compared it to others ranked higher, and the thing that crossed my mind was "how in the hell is HE ranked higher than ME??" A little investigation usually turned up a regular open trackback post or several. Not that I'm knocking them for doing it, it's a good attention grabber, so much so that I recently started doing more of them than I used to.
But I will say that I think it's a bad idea to go ahead with this. It defeats a major reason for a blogger to even create a trackback. If this goes forward, than that means other than the link it generates on the receiving blog, you really have no other reason to bother with them.
I'll be honest. I don't do trackbacks as often as I should, and my rankings suffers for it. I jump around like crazy. When I make an effort to stay on top of it and make sure my trackbacks are created, then my rankings improve and stay up there. But I'm not blogging to get to the top of the blogosphere food chain, so it's not really a big issue with me. That doesn't mean it's not a big issue with other, newer blogs.
He then points out a Whizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger you can use to create pings.
Okay, it's time for me to come clean: I'm a bad blogger. I don't know what a ping really does and how it would affect the Ecosystem. I link others, isn't that enough? That Pinger site looks easy enough to use - I'm going to play around with it a bit, trying to trackback this post. I suppose given what he's saying, whatever this mysterious effect was, it'll soon be moot at this stage.
UPDATE: Okay, it now includes me on the list you get when you click on Trackback at the bottom of IV's post. So I take it that counts as a link by IV to me??? If so, what stops people from being trackback spammers to up the ratings? Just curious. I mean, if I had a link back from every link I put on this blog it could look rather impressive, but it would say nothing about who's actually listening to me.
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