Laura James

If you have a blog, or website, such as on the WordPress platform, you may have received a notice about something called a “pingback.” Basically, when someone links to one of your blog posts, you will be notified of this by WordPress. This notification is called a “pingback.” There are some important factors to keep in mind when it comes to this topic, as I will outline below:

While a pingbacks appear to be the same as blog comment, they are definitely not the same. In fact, pingbacks are included in the comments section of a WordPress blog, so some people mistakenly think they are on the same level as a blog comment. Therefore, let me emphasise the following: You may cause serious consequences to the rank of your website and your blog pages if you are not knowledgeable about how to skillfully handle pingbacks.

In most cases, pingbacks are spam. Spam comments and spam pingbacks have a lot in common. They are nasty and you need to make sure your blog is not tainted by their presence. Remember, if a pingback is spam and you publish it, this link is now published on your blog. By doing so, you are indicating that you approve this link for your website, and, in turn, your website becomes associated with this other “spam pushing” website. This is definitely not a good idea. You do not want to diminish the quality of your website, both in terms of your search engine status and in the opinions of your website’s visitors. Publishing spam pingbacks gives the impression that you do not know, or care about, what is actually published on your blog or website. Some top notch bloggers, the ones who publish something daily and have a high level of readers, may consider publishing legitimate (actually from humans) pingbacks as a means of letting other bloggers reciprocate. In most cases though, pingbacks are not published even by those who have achieved blogging success.

In terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization or Optimisation…depending on what part of the world you’re from), attracting traffic to a blog, and building links, pingbacks are more beneficial than comments for the person who has decided to link to your website. Of course, this is dependent on you actually publishing the pingback. If you do, some important things occur. First, doing so means your readers have to go to the other person’s blog in order to read what they have said about your blog post. Second, if you publish the pingback, you create a link to the post on their blog that directly relates to the topic of your blog post. This varies from a simple comment, which generally includes domain name as the URL and the person’s name. Remember, you don’t want your website/blog to be associated with spam, so be careful about publishing pingbacks.

Please note that some blog platforms will automatically publish a pingback. Yikes! This certainly benefits the spammers. This means a spambot will create a link to one of your blog posts. After it is published, the spambot or website, which creates the link to your blog/website, will automatically receive a link in return back to their blog/website. Not fair, of course, but it is important to be aware of this possibility.

If you want to disable pingbacks within WordPress, go to Settings > Discussion > Default article settings. Uncheck the box for “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) Keep this box checked if you want to know when someone, or a spambot, has linked to your blog.

By default, pingbacks are turned on within WordPress, and most major blog platforms. This way, if someone creates a link to one of your blog posts within one of their blog posts (instead of leaving a comment directly on your blog), you will receive notification, generally via e-mail, about this and you may then decide whether to publish the pingback. If you decide to publish the pingback, it will show up at the end of your post along with the published comments. Your readers can then click the link in the published pingback and go see what that person who linked to you is saying about your post – on that person’s blog. This means your readers are then going to another blog for the information. Be cautious about giving your readers the opportunity, or incentive, to do so.

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The author of this article, Laura James, is the Chief Executive Officer of Best Designed Blogs. This company provides complete online business solutions.

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