What are weblog trackbacks and why should I include them on my blog?

Dave, I’ve been looking at a lot of different weblogs in the last few weeks and notice that while some list “Trackback” or “Pingback” right on their index page, others have that information on individual entry pages, and yet others seem to have either hidden or completely removed trackbacks altogether. What are trackbacks and “trackback pings” and why would I want them on my blog?

Trackbacks — also known as pingbacks in some blogging applications — started out as an ingenious method of having two different Weblog articles cross-reference each other automatically. It’s best explained by example. Say you’d written an article on your site about trackbacks. I could point to it here on my Weblog with an explicit link, then people who read my article could ostensibly click through and read your piece too. If someone started out at your site, however, they’d never know that I also wrote about the same topic and that I had linked to your article.

So what if when I submitted my article to my Weblog management system (Movable Type, in this case) it automatically…

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