Don’t Trackback. Use Pingback

Posted on August 14, 2007
Filed Under WordPress Configuration |

Trackback and pingback are two WordPress supported protocols for automated communications/notifications between blogs. In WordPress, you can configure the blog to allow or not allow trackbacks/pingbacks. But you cannot allow one but turn off the other. However, you don’t have to use trackback, as pingback itself works perfectly.

How does trackback work

If you want to trackback an article on a specific blog, first you need to get the trackback URL. A tracklink link is usually showed under the article. This link is not for clicking. If you move mouse over it, it may show something like “Copy this url to trackback this entry”. That’s what you should do, - right-click and copy the link location.

Then you need to enter the trackback URL to “Trackbacks” field in the lower part of post/page writing panel. When you publish your new article, a trackback message is sent to the trackback URL to notice that blog.

A lot of blogs don’t display trackback link at all, that doesn’t mean they turned trackback/pingback off, most likely they didn’t. If you still want to give a try, use the article’s URL plus /trackback, it may work.

Don’t trackback

As you see, trackback involves a lot of manual activities. It’s not worth the time. Because trackback can be used to sent notice to other blogs without any relevance, it has been used for trackback spams. That’s why a lot of bloggers don’t want to display trackback link. In this site the theme I used doesn’t show trackback link. You may also edit the theme’s source code to modify the trackback link url so that spamers cannot guess. There are plugins to stop trackback spams too.

Use pingback

Instead of sending notice to a blog site, pingbacks send notice to blog-indexing services such as technorati, then the services notice specific blogs if your article referred an entry in that blog.

You can pingback these blog-indexing services manually by going to their websites directly and enter your website or article’s url there. for example, you can do this by visiting technorati.com, pingomatic.com, etc.

Another way to pingback is to enter the pinging services URL for each article. In the article writing pannel (admin panel > writing), near the bottom of the page there is a section called “Trackbacks” where you can enter the pingback URL.

However, it is not necessary to do pingback manually because pinging services URLs can be pre-set for all articles to send pingback automatically.

When installing WordPress, by default you allow search engines to search and index your blog (its a check box prechecked) therefore your blog is set as non-private. In this case, one ping service, pingomatic.com, was entered.

Also, to enable pinging URLs in the blog entry, make sure there is a check mark next to “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)” in the “Options->Discussion” section of the WordPress admin panel.

Log into admin panel, select Options tab, click Writing menu. On the lower part of the page under “Update Services” you should see Ping-O-Matic’s pingback URL:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

Ping-O-Matic is a relay ping service that pings many other pingingservices automatically, that means when you ping Ping-O-Matic, it will do the rest of the pinging for you.

To verify that the pingbacks were sent successfully, go to the Edit panel of the article, on the lower part of the page there is a section called “Trackbacks’ where you can see a “Already pinged” URL list.

Hasin Hayder, author of “WordPress Complete”, suggested also adding Technorati ping url http://rpc.technorati.com, thus the “Update Services” box I have the following entries:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/ping

As Hasin explained, Technorati is a very popular blog-indexing service and if you have your blog listed here, you can expect better page ranking for sure. On the other hand, Ping-O-Matic is a central pinging service that itself pings many other popular services.

Therefore, the advantage of pingback is not only sending notice to the referred article blog, but also noticing the blog-indexing services to get your blog indexed.

As you see, after you setup “Update Services”, the pingback process is totally automatic.

Comments

2 Responses to “Don’t Trackback. Use Pingback”

  1. Pinging Your Blogs to Search Engines: How Linking to Blogs Can Increase your Traffic on August 30th, 2007 12:56 pm

    [...] of chatter from other bloggers on how to safely use trackbacks and pingbacks, here’s just a sample:Don’t Trackback. Use Pingback : WordPress Profithowtomarketyourstuff.com » Blog Archive » Trackback, Pingbac..Blogging for Business: Search engine [...]

  2. How to Turn Off Trackback : WordPress Profit on October 29th, 2007 6:06 pm

    [...] and pingback. While trackback is not much useful, pingback is preferred for most blogs (see Don’t Trackback. Use Pingback). In this case, the better solution might be to hide trackback or use plugins to fight [...]

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