Trackbacks versus Referrers
A great question came in to me today about Community Server and I wanted to share.
In Community Server, when you view all of your posts in the control panel, there's a link on the "views" field which links to a "referrers" page. So the question is basically, what's the difference between a trackback and a referrer.
First, trackbacks are active pings to your site when a post is published on a site that supports trackbacks. I'll spare you the really great technical details but when a post is created on a site that supports trackbacks, the server will parse the post and send a trackback ping to all URLs it finds in that post. If your system also supports trackbacks, your system will record these pings as trackbacks.
Port25, by the way, does a really interesting thing with their trackbacks - check out the right nav of this post. I love that!
Referrals, on the other hand, are recorded based on, to the best of my knowledge, the HTTP Referrer of an HTTP Request. When someone lands in your site from a link somewhere, Community Server records the referrer to the blog post. This referrer could be almost anything - a link on someone's homepage, a search engine or even a blog post. Basically - this records where people are landing on your site from.
I thought that was a great question - hope you like the info!