Pingbacks and trackbacks have become a very important feature in the blogosphere. This post discusses why pingbacks are such a fantastic feature for blog owners.
What are Pingbacks?
A pingback is essentially linkback method where a signal from one site is sent to another. When the receiving site gets a ping it checks the pinging site to see if a link is valid.Here’s what wikipedia says about pingbacks
‘A Pingback is one of three types of Linkbacks methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog software, such as WordPress and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published.Essentially, a Pingback is a signal (ping) sent from Site A to Site B. However, it’s also a link. When Site B receives the notification signal, it automatically goes back to Site A checking for the existence of a live incoming link. If that link exists, the Pingback is recorded successfully. This makes Pingbacks less prone to spam than Trackbacks. Both sites must be Pingback enabled in order to establish this communication. If a site is Pingback enabled, each time you link-out you will be “pinging” external sites. Pingback requires for Site A to physically link to Site B.’
WordPress has an option which allows automatic pinging whenever you make a post though some blog scripts make you do it manually (In wordpress you can set it up automatically by going to options, discussion and then checking ‘Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article ‘).
A Pingback Example
One of my best friend is a golf nut and recently started his own blog called Mikes Golf Blog. His most recent post is titled Field for Tiger’s tournament set at 120.
By linking to the post above, the blog software of BloggingTips (wordpress) will ping Mikes Golf Blog telling it that there is a link to a post from BloggingTips. It will then check this page to verify that link and when it finds it will register a pingback. Which means that this post will show a pingback to this site ie. a link to this post.
So why are they so great?
You should now have an understanding of how pingbacks work. If you read blogs on a regular basis then you will know how important pingbacks are to blogging and specifically discussions regarding the topic.
Once again, ill use an example to help illustrate it for those who dont (as per usual!).
Say you are looking for a new mp3 player. You lost your ipod and have decided to get something different this time, perhaps a microsoft zune or creative zen. However, your still not sure what to get and whether you should just and get another ipod and have been searching the web for more information. You then find a fantastic review on a blog about the creative zen. At the end of the blog post you will see comments to the review (perhaps with more useful info). After that you should also see pingbacks for this post. The pingbacks will show all the sites which are linked to this post. Through these pingbacks you will be able to see what sites are discussing this review and perhaps find more great comments and useful information about the creative zen that isn’t on the initial review. In a way they allow discussions to continue outside of the original blog site.
