Other blogs are pinging your blog and your blog isn't receiving them. Have you ever wondered why? Do you care? If you don't know or you don't care, how do you know anyone is pinging you? Are you relying on a 3rd-party service like Technorati or are you waiting for them to appear on your dashboard? Technorati doesn't always respond to pings and your dashboard relies on Google's blog search (although this can be changed in the later versions of WordPress). Wouldn't fixing the incoming ping problem be a better solution?

This is a follow-up to both "WordPress Bloggers: Fix Your Incoming Pings With WP_PingPreserver" and "A WordPress Guide to Pingbacks and Trackbacks". This time, the emphasis is on your theme code.

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Way back in August of 2007 (months are like years on the net), I wrote a guest article called "Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They?" for Pearl at Interesting Observations. While it was effective in educating quite a few people at the time, it's evident by reading the responses to Ronald Huereca's article, "Trackbacks: Still Useful?", that there are still more people that need to learn how to use pingbacks and trackbacks to their advantage.

Pieces of the Puzzle

You can view the TrackBack Technical Specification to get an idea of how trackbacks work. Due to spamming abuse, I don't recommend using standard trackbacks except in special circumstances. The WordPress software has a specific area from which to send pings that are handled as trackbacks at receiving blogs.

You can view the Pingback 1.0 specification and wade through a lot of technical jargon but, in essence, a pingback is like a trackback on steroids. In fact, pingbacks are often called trackbacks (there really is a difference). You don't have to do anything special to send pings that are handled as pingbacks at receiving blogs. Every time you create a link (hyperlink) to another blog within a post or page, the WordPress software will automatically ping that blog.

A WordPress blog needs only one piece of code in a theme's index.php file to receive and process pings for both trackbacks and pingbacks: <!– <?php trackback_rdf(); ?> –>. If that function is missing, your WordPress blog won't be able to process pings.

Disable Spamming Trackbacks While Making Trackbacks Useful

There's a great plugin for WordPress (that I use) called "Simple Trackback Validation". You can use it to handle the standard trackbacks that the bundled Akismet doesn't catch as spam. Not all trackbacks are spam, so I recommend placing them in the moderation queue.

For one reason or another and every so often, a ping generated by an outbound link doesn't reach the destination like it should. Network connectivity and other factors can stop a ping in its tracks (no pun intended). If you publish a post which contains an outbound link to a specific blog post on another blog, and it doesn't appear in the comments of that blog, 1 of 3 things has happened:

• The ping wasn't received.
• The ping was flagged as spam and is sitting in the receiving blog's spam area.
• Pings are turned off at the receiving blog post.

While the 3rd item can be checked by visiting the receiving blog post, the other two cannot. One way to make sure a ping goes through is to use the "Trackbacks" area of your blog post to resend a ping to a particular post. The STV plugin I mentioned will disregard it because you have the outbound link in your blog post. If it still doesn't work, there may be conflicts with other plugins at the receiving end. You shouldn't try to send a trackback like this more than once.

Linkbacks as Backlinks

A linkback is a term that covers 3 kinds of comment notifications: Refback, Trackback and Pingback. You can follow the link to see the differences.

When a linkback appears in a blog's comment section, it can become a backlink. "Backlink" is the term search engines use for links that point to your blog. It can only become a backlink, however, if the "nofollow" attribute doesn't exist for the pingback link. I've been using a "dofollow" plugin for so long that I can't remember if the "nofollow" attribute is even there by default.

Regardless, a ping of any kind doesn't do any good for the sending blog if it's pointed to anything other than a post (or a page, if pings are enabled in the theme). The receiving blog benefits from all of your outbound links (as long as you use good anchor text, but that's another topic and I won't get into it).

As I alluded to in my article about the value of a ping, linkbacks that appear on other blogs drive traffic to your blog. For this reason alone, you should link out to relevant articles on other blogs as often as possible.

But I'm not getting any pings!

I read this, or something similar to it, several times per month. If you're creating excellent content, and people see the content, you'll get pings to that content. It's really that simple. If every post you make is mediocre at best, you won't get any pings, ever. If you're producing great content and still not getting any pings, your blog post isn't being publicized enough.

While it's a topic in itself, publicizing your blog is extremely important and you can do it without extreme and blatant self-promotion. If you want to know some of the ways I do it (and now get consistently over 300 unique visitors per day, increasing a little each day), all you have to do is ask. Use my contact page, that's one of the reasons it's there.

Recommended Plugins

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the WordPress Plugins I use to control trackback and comment spam, while allowing legitimate pings to come through and get processed as pingbacks:

• Simple Trackback Validation (which I already mentioned)
• TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter Plus (SSF) (see below for some additions to the options that really help)
• No Self Pings (so other filters don't have to process mine as well)
• WP_PingPreserver (to prevent WordPress from discarding pings that come in too fast)

Add these to the banned patterns of SSF:

^<strong>
^cool
^wow cool
^interesting
^wow interesting
^nice
^wow nice
^sorry
^wow sorry

Looking at my counts as of right now, Akismet has caught only 23,990 spam comments while the SSF has caught 99,300 spam comments (and I installed SSF a long time after I started receiving spam).

Conclusion

Now that I've explained, in the best way I can, how to use pings, pingbacks and trackbacks, is there really any reason to completely disable them or defeat their usefulness on your own blog?

Is there something I've left out? If so, I'd be more than willing to create a part 2. This article is already much longer than I anticipated.

* * * * * * *

If you'd like to read more specifically about pingbacks, I recommend you read "Why Your WordPress Blog Isn't Receiving Pings".

Or a monkey out of my butt, whichever you prefer. The last section of this article contains the most important paragraphs in this article, but don't let that stop you from reading the paragraphs between this one and those.

The Wrong Hat?

Unlike how Bullwinkle always reached for a rabbit, and pulled out something else, I've managed to reach for just about anything and pulled out a few nuggets of gold.

I'm not a professional writer by any stretch of the imagination, but a few people consider me an authority (like Sandee) on some of the topics I've written about. Over the course of my lifetime (short or long, depending on your perspective), I've worn many hats and here are just a few:

• The student's hat.
• The military hat.
• The manager's hat.
• The programmer's hat.
• The writer's hat.

While the writer's hat is the hat I've worn for the least amount of time, it's the hat I enjoy wearing the most.

Nuggets of Gold

Over the course of about 18 months, the short lifespan of this blog (eons in Internet years), I've managed to write a few gems that have garnered more than their fair share of exposure. Here are a select few:

• Rewrite, Republish and Redirect Old Blog Posts – Recycle Those Electrons!
• Attention Bloggers: We Need To Change
• Link It Forward
• Breaking The Blogging Monotony
• Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation ARE Important When Writing a Blog Post

Blogging Versus Writing and Articles Versus Posts

Whether you're aware of it or not, there's a difference between blogging and writing. Blogging is a term which means posting on a blog — any kind of posting. Writing, the word itself, means exactly that — writing. It doesn't include the images and other things that are included in a post.

For the most part, "article" is synonymous with "post". There's a subtle difference that I'm pointing out. Articles tend to include more text than anything else and are more than just posting an image or two. Articles include tutorials, historical narratives, and other topics that are much more focused than the typical post. What I'm writing right now would be considered an article.

Share Your Wisdom

I'll make a deal with you.

Write an article to share your best "nuggets of gold" and find a way to link to any of my nuggets. The ones that YOU consider nuggets, not me. Make sure you tell me about it somehow, just in case I don't receive a ping, a Google Alert, or it fails to appear as a link on Technorati. I check all of those things, but I'm not infallible and I miss as many as I catch.

In return, I'll find a way to mention that article, and probably some of your nuggets as well. Don't expect it to happen overnight, however, because I'm writing at the mercy of an ISP which can't keep me online for even 50 percent of the time. If you tell me about your article, I'll be able to specifically target your blog. Otherwise, your backlink could end up in a mere "Backlink Bonanza" type of post.

You may be thinking, "Why should I link to this guy's blog? He has a lowly Google PageRank of ZERO!" Well, after my last sponsored post becomes an unsponsored post on January 9th and I request reconsideration from Google, I'm guaranteed to get some kind of PageRank back. I had a PR of 4 before the first round of Google's slapfest. With enough linkage from some of your PR 4, 5 and 6 blogs, I suspect it could be higher on the rebound.

Seriously, I'd like to be able to show Rocky that I can pull a real rabbit out of my hat!

The word "ping" is derived from the acronym PING, which stands for "Packet Internet Groper" (no kidding!). According to Webster's New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, a ping is designed "to get someone's attention with a sharp sound or other form of communication". The ping I'm talking about is the Internet equivalent of that kind of ping.

Most blogging software will ping other blogs automatically whenever a new article is posted. Those that don't can be made to do so by using third-party solutions. As I explained in a guest article I wrote for Pearl at Interesting Observations, pings create pingbacks. A ping is created either by a link within a post or by a specific trackback to a trackback URL that isn't a link within a post. Either type of ping will normally create a pingback on a receiving blog. What does the pingback do? It gets the attention of the author (and only the author if the ping isn't to a specific post) and the readers of that site.

Within the last 2 days, my blog received pings from 2 other blogs that I'd never been to or even heard of. Each one mentioned a different, specific blog article. I have all my comments emailed to me (I don't receive the comments for other authors like my guest author, Hari) and I received the pingbacks as comments in my email. Not being familiar with either blog, I simply had to go check them out.

Stalkk.ed

The first one I visited is called "Stalkk.ed". It's an interesting name, but I couldn't get beyond the article itself to investigate it. What a find this was! It's a list of 100+ WordPress plugins, articles and resources. I checked a couple of them out and I'll definitely be going back for more. Enrico Bertini linked to my article about WP_PingPreserver.

Needless Productions

The second one I visited is called "Needless Productions". Ryan Edmunds weighed in with his opinion on RealRank, SocialSpark and PageRank and linked to my article about SocialSpark, PayPerPost, RealRank, Google and You (article since deleted).

The value of the pings

By linking to my articles, both blogs have produced backlinks to my blog and are driving traffic to it. In return, my pingbacks produced backlinks for their blogs and this article will produce more. That's how Internet linking is supposed to work. Placing "rel=nofollow" attributes on links like this (which are unpaid links) defeats the purpose of organic linking in the search engines. Some bloggers are doing this and I think it's a HUGE mistake.

WordPress has a problem with incoming pings. If you write an article that has more than one link to the same blog in it, one or more of the pings may be discarded by their software. WP_PingPreserver can fix the problem.

You may wonder why the problem exists and you may also wonder why it's important to fix it. This is the problem, and I'll quote directly from Scott's article at Dammit Jim!:

…the function wp_throttle_comment_flood from wp-include/comment.php is automatically added as a default filter (in /wp-includes/default-filters.php). This function checks if the last comment from the commentor’s IP address was within 15 seconds and if so rejects the comment. This is obviously a problem with pings when 2 or 3 comments will be coming from the same IP within seconds.

I tested it on my blog to make sure it was a problem (and it was) and then installed the plugin. I did that last night. Today, I tested it by linking to Blog-Op three times. Yes, Chris was my guinea pig. Do you want to know what happened? The first link pinged the right article on his blog, the second link ping went into lala land and the third link pinged the second article on his blog. The third article did not receive a ping. I would definitely call this a problem. Fortunately, you can fix it on your own blog by installing the plugin. Hopefully, the WordPress developers will pick up on it and fix the core files for WordPress so we won't need the plugin.

Why is it important to fix it? Well, it probably isn't if you don't care about the people that link to your blog. If you do, read on as I expound on it.

All of the comment header links, which include manual comments, pingbacks and trackbacks, have the "rel=nofollow" tag added to the URLs on a standard WordPress installation. Those links count as nothing, as far as search engines are concerned, for people that comment or link to your blog. Many blog owners, including myself, have installed one of the many "dofollow" plugins to remove that tag and give link credit to everyone who comments or links to their blogs. Blogs that "dofollow" give link credit to every comment, pingback and trackback — link love at its finest.

So what happened when I linked three times to Blog-Op? Since Chris has a "dofollow" plugin installed, I received link credits for two out of three links. It should have been three out of three. It doesn't bother me, but I'm sure it would bother anyone else who links out all the time to other WordPress blogs when they see missing pingbacks on the other blogs.

Anytime you give, and it doesn't matter what the object of the giving is, you almost always receive something in return. Objects in this context include:

• Link love (oh, how some people hate that phrase). Linking to blogs that have content related to your own or content that you've written about.
• Charity. Giving to everyone from family to people you don't even know.
• Favors. "Digging" and "Stumbling" without being asked to do so.

Link love (or blog appreciation as I like to call it now) results in two things: 1) Pingbacks and trackbacks to your own blog, and 2) Visitors to the blogs that you link to will sometimes see your ping and visit your blog as a direct result. There's a good chance the author(s) of a particular blog will visit your blog as well.

Charity comes in all shapes and sizes and doesn't necessarily mean money. You can give your time, your labor, your knowledge, and (of course) money. When you give any of these things away, it's human nature to reciprocate with something and that something is usually worth far more to you than what you gave in the first place.

Favors are also a form of giving, as long as you don't ask for anything in return. Digging and stumbling for blogs can be used as favors. If you don't know what I'm talking about because you're new to all this, just visit Digg and StumbleUpon and get involved.

As far as I'm concerned, giving means nothing if I always tell people that I'm doing it at the time. I don't need my ego stroked and I don't require anything in return, ever. It amazes me how I almost always receive something in return, regardless of how anonymous I choose to be.

Anyone who reads my blog on a regular basis knows that I link to almost every blog I visit, in one way or another, at one time or another. It doesn't matter if I agree with their written words or not. If I took the time to read or even just look at something, it had to be worth it or I wouldn't have gone there in the first place. I attribute this as one of the things that continues to propel my rankings in an upward direction.

I'm not bragging, because I have a fixed income, that I support two families here — both families are related to me through my wife. I would love to get more involved in other charitable projects, but my income (at this time) and my banking situation doesn't give me that flexibility. Members of both families know how I feel and still aggressively attempt to do things for me that they know I can't do or don't like to do.

I have a lot of "digg friends" now as well as a lot of "stumble friends". I digg almost every submission made by my friends on Digg and I have my StumbleUpon toolbar set to stumble pages for "Friends". I'm sure other people do the same thing. How else can I explain the sudden bursts of traffic that I get?

These are just some examples of the effects of giving that I've experienced. What kind of effects have you experienced as the result of giving?