I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking what the heck is a “trackback” and a “pingback”? This is my humble attempt to explain these two types of blog to blog communication and why you might want to enable this behavior in your WordPress blog.

Here’s how WordPress defines trackbacks and pingbacks. I read each several times and am still a bit confused.

But it’s all about having your blog automatically notify other people’s blogs that you’ve linked to an article of theirs, and hopefully if they have the trackbacks/pingbacks enabled, it will put a link to your article on their site, which is pretty cool.

Here’s the setting in the WordPress admin area to enable trackbacks and pingbacks:

Now, if you enable this, and you link to blog articles from your own blog articles, you’ll get these pingback notices via email. They confused me for quite a while until I realized what they were. It’s the same blog to blog communication, except that it’s the same blog. I just delete them when I get them.

I got my first pingback link the other day when I wrote an article, and in my article added a link to an article in the Click Fraud Network.

Their website added this automatically to the comments section of the article I had linked to:

So let’s review. I wrote an article. In my article I linked to their article. My blog sent their blog a pingback and said “hey, I’m linking to you”. And their blog, which also had pingbacks enabled, said “ok, I’ll add a link to you in my comments section”.

I’m already getting traffic from this article to mine!

If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill