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What is Trackback? What is a Pingback?

Trackbacks and Pingbacks are a way to notify other blogs that you posted a link from one of your blog articles to their blog article. Trackbacks and Pingbacks essentially function the same and have the same purpose which is to notify the other blog owner. The blog owner can then approve or disapprove the trackback or pingback as a comment on their blog. Trackbacks and pingbacks are at the discretion of the blog owner.

Trackback and pingback features can be abused and I certainly do not condone spam and abuse. Many times trackback and pingback features can be disabled by the website owner to prevent spammers or, at least, need to be approved just as comments need to be approved.

Here is a fast how to guide on effectively using the trackback or pingback. You will either use the trackback or the pingback to notify the other blog that you made a reference (i.e. link) to it. Since many sites support the pingback you will use only one of the features but not both. If you use both two urls may be left at the other site’s blog and this could annoy the blog owner. Checking to see if the blog has the pingback feature enabled is easy. When at the site of the blog that you will be linking to, right click then “view source”. Scroll down and search for something like the following near the top of the view source page:

This tells you the site supports pingbacks. By clicking the edit button of your blog article after it is published you should notice that Wordpress has pinged the other blog and there will be note below the custom field section. If you do not see this note after you publish your blog and the other site supports pingbacks you may wish to notify the blog owner. I have found that because of too much spam the blog owner simply disables the pingback and comments area. I found a notice on one blog in the side column that stated “Both comments and pings are currently closed.”

How to Notify the Other Blog When Using Pingbacks

Pingbacks are easier to use than trackbacks because all you need to do is type in the url to the blog article you are linking to and discussing about in your new post. When you publish your new post Wordpress will automatically notify and ping the other blog. However, in Wordpress you need to set the auto-notify feature on. Login to your admin section click on the “Options/Discussion” tabs then simply make sure that you have the checkbox “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)” checked.

How to Notify the Other Blog When Using Trackbacks

Trackbacks usually involves an extra step or two. At the bottom of the other blog’s article you should notice a trackback url or in some cases a hypertext link that states “trackback”. In firefox, right click it then select “Copy Link Location” or in Internet Explorer, right click then select “Copy Shortcut” to save the trackback link. Then paste this link in the Trackback section of your new post. Once published Wordpress will notify the the other blog automatically.

Both trackbacks and pingbacks are important in blog marketing and to help create the global blog community. They create a continual and incessant discussion thread of what others of each blog posting and you can follow these discussions from one blog to another. This also helps search engines explore and index your blog as well. However, this can lead to abuse and I do not condone spamming in any sort of marketing efforts. I will be discussing in a later blog posting about the importance of search engine indexing with the use of sitemaps. Happy blogging! =)

Harvest for Christ

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 9:28 pm and is filed under WordPress Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.