What are backlinks and how do I use them?

The Quick Answer

• Backlinks display other webpages that link to your posts.
• To enable backlinks on your blog go to your Settings|Comments tab and select Show

Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. For instance, suppose Alice writes a blog entry that Bob finds interesting. Bob then goes to his own blog and writes a post of his own about it, linking back to Alice's original post. Now Alice's post will automatically show that Bob has linked to it, and it will provide a short snippet of his text and a link to his post. What it all works out to is a way of expanding the comment feature such that related discussions on other sites can be included along with the regular comments on a post.
The backlinks setting can be found under the Settings | Comments tab, and consists of a single, simple option to turn it on or off:
Our default templates are already set up with the necessary code for backlinks. However, if you have a custom template, or one of our templates from before this feature was launched, you will need to add the code yourself. Instructions for that are here.
Once everything is set up, you'll see a new link marked "Links to this post" next to the comment link for each post:
If you click that link you'll be taken to the post page, where the backlinks are all listed beneath the comments. Clicking the triangles next to each link will display a snippet of text from the page linking to you, as well as some author and date information.