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".

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.