We all know about the Top Commentators plugin, which allows WordPress bloggers to display the readers that have made the most comments in their sidebar. This is particularly useful for readers who want to get a quality inbound link from a particular website (its considered a quality link and more valuable because it is featured on every page on the website, rather than on a single post).

The problem with this system is that it doesn’t really reward the blogger themselves, as all that blogger gets is possibly more comments on their posts. The value of a comment is pretty minimal in the overall scheme of things, while an inbound link is usually highly coveted, giving the Trackbackers plugin a lot more potential to reward bloggers.

The Trackbackers plugin works in much the same way as the Top Commentators plugin, except that it displays the blogs that have sent the most trackbacks. The idea is instead of encouraging comments, you can encourage people to link to you by sending trackbacks with their outbound links to your site. The neat thing about this plugin is that the person sending the trackback will get a link to their site in the sidebar and it will stay there for a set length of time, which could be considered getting more back then they gave when they sent the trackback!

After seeing this plugin, it is surprising to me that no one thought of this idea before. It is still in an early version, so the potential is there for a truly popular WordPress plugin.