Comments on: What Are Pings, Trackbacks, and Pingbacks?

By: Garrett Oden

Garrett Oden — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:04:50 +0000

Alright, thanks for the speedy support!

By: Michael Martine

Michael Martine — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:06:17 +0000

Garrett, you could choose a WordPress theme that lists trackbacks separately from comments. The only way to know for sure is to test it out on your blog, since you’re using wordpress.com.

By: Garrett Oden

Garrett Oden — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:49:03 +0000

Alright, thanks for the help!

One last thing:
Should I accept all trackbacks that are relevant? They take up comment space, and I am not sure they would be good if they came in during a discussion.

By: Michael Martine

Michael Martine — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:22:20 +0000

Garrett, the advantage in approving it is that it shows your post is worth linking to because others are linking to it. A long list of trackbacks means the post is worth spreading around. The trackbacks you should not approve are the spammy ones.

By: Garrett Oden

Garrett Oden — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:26:33 +0000

I use a wordpress.com blog.

When receiving a pingback or trackback, what are the advantages/ disadvantages of approving it? I can either accept it as a comment, or choose not to.

Does it matter which one I choose? Which one would you do?

Thanks for the help!

By: Pam

Pam — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:46:53 +0000

Thanks for the clear explanation! Wonderful!

By: Michael Martine

Michael Martine — Thu, 21 May 2009 03:29:39 +0000

Robert, perform pings means that your server is sending out pings (notifications) to any site you’ve linked to in your post (it “pings” them, like saying “hey, I just linked to you!”). Allow pings means that when others link to your post, a link to their post appears under your post like a comment. This is a pingback. When a pingback happens, the two posts are then linked to each other.

Clear as mud, now, right?

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 21 May 2009 02:59:05 +0000

Hi Michael, I am still confused. For example in the dashboard of some plugins like wp-o-matic we find PERFORM PINGBACKS, what does this mean?

Does it mean that we WILL NOTIFY the feed source of our post?
Or does it mean that we WILL BE NOTIFIED if someone links to our post?

Then, just after this option, there is another one that is ambigous to me:
Discussion options: Allow Pings or Disallow

What’s the difference between PERFORM PINGBACKS and ALLOW PINGS

Thank you best regards,

By: Michael Martine, Blog Consultant

Michael Martine, Blog Consultant — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:44:38 +0000

No there is no problem from search engines if there is more than one pingback from the same site. From a search engine’s point of view, a pingback is no different than any other html anchor (in other words, it has no idea how that link was created, it’s just parsing html code in the page).

By: Sega

Sega — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:31:36 +0000

Can i approve more than one pingback from one site? is there any linking problem by search engine?