This isn’t news if you’ve been blogging for a while, but I’m fairly new at this (while an old hand with web sites in general), and one of the confusing things for me was these oddball things called pingbacks and trackbacks.
After a bit of googling and poking around, a found a nice site that has a lot of information on blogging in general – optiniche – that had a very helpful post about pingbacks and trackbacks.
I’m not going to repeat the whole explanation here, but the bottom line is that if you make a blog post that happens to have a link to someone else’s blog post, a comment will magically appear on their blog post that links back to your blog post.
So, in a way, it’s almost like an automatic link exchange feature, which is awesome because exchanging links is one of the best ways to increase web traffic to your site. So understanding pingbacks and trackbacks was important for me because it seems to be getting harder and harder to do link exchanges the old-fashioned way, particularly because there are so many blogs out there now.
Now for a couple of caveats and observations:
- Trackbacks are a more “manual” method of making these links between blog posts. You actually have to cut and past the URL you want to point to and put it in the trackback field in your blog post.
- Pingbacks handle the “exchange” automatically. If there’s a link in your post to someone else’s blog post, the pingback software will automatically communicate between the blogs and put the comment on the other person’s post.
- The pingback and/or trackback function has to be enabled on both blogs for it to work.
- If you have pingbacks enabled, don’t make a manual trackback, too, or you might wind up with double comments on the other person’s blog post.
So, please do check out optiniche and take a look at some of the information the author has there on blogging and marketing!
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