Pingbacks and Trackbacks in WordPress, what are they?

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The time has come to talk about the elephant in the room (as they say in Anglo-Saxon countries).

If you have been interested in this article, when reading its title, or if you have found it through the search engine of our blog, it is because, either you have a abysmal curiosity or because you have decided to read a little about what they are and what they are for pingbacks and the trackback in wordpress.

As I almost always like to use an easy metaphor to explain something technical, today I am going to make you relive very tender moments from your childhood.

Think about how you’re back at school and it’s almost recess time. You are already hungry and you know that you have in your backpack a delicious sandwich that your mother has prepared for you in the morning.

You’re making your legs wobble from side to side as they dangle on the chair and you’re staring blankly at that boy or girl you like in class. You are madly in love (or what you think love is at that age).

You turn on yourself and turn around, to talk to your old friend, and tell him to please go tell that little person how crazy he makes you, a message as simple as: X likes you.

Since your friend is a love adventurer, he jumps up from his chair and goes to talk to your crush. He whispers something in her ear, and that special person for you turns to look at you. At that moment, something happens, a decision on the part of that person, what you will understand at the end of this article.

From all this sweet story, stay with the fact that your friend is going to notify the person you like, that he likes you, it’s a pingback, and that person, upon receipt of such notice, shall decide whether make a trackback. 😉

Ping&Track

No, it is not a new Netflix series, they are two concepts that, if I explain them well, will make you begin to know what differences there are between these two very similar expressions in WordPress (pingback and trackback).

Ping it is when you actively do something towards someone, related to an electronic communication.

Especially if you work with international people or very “cool” to use a Spanish word, when they say “Ping me” it will mean “give me a touch”.

Here you already have a clear concept of pingback in wordpress: when you notify another website of something you have done on your website.

Nevertheless, tracks it is something that is done, also actively, about something and this time, that affects us directly in the first place.

For example, if you have fallen off your bike and feel your body to see if you have broken something, you are doing a tracking of possible injuries.

Therefore, you are also clear about the concept of trackback in wordpress: when you are notified that someone has done something that directly affects your website.

How does a pingback and a trackback work?

Let’s see it with an example: Pepito writes an article about nutrition on his WordPress blog, drawing inspiration for it from an article he read some time ago on Juanita’s blog, whom he mentions through a link to said article.

Pepito’s blog automatically sends a notification (pingback) to Juanita’s blog to tell her that she has been mentioned in the nutrition article.

Juanita, if you have everything ideally set up (we’ll see it later), you’ll receive a notification on your WordPress blog, where you’ll see that you have a “comment moderation” pending, in the form of a trackback, and you have to decide what to do with it ( we see it later too).

What can be done with a trackback?

When you receive a trackback (I insist, notification that someone talks about you in his article, mentioning your website through a link), you have three options:

post it and that it appears as a comment on the article that has been mentioned (this has its consequences on SEO, which we will see below).
mark it as spam (It is usually the most common, unfortunately).
delete it because you are not interested in mentioning it in your article (it also has consequences for SEO).

But don’t get overwhelmed yet, there is still much to explain about pingbacks and trackbacks in this article.

Classic function of use VS more realistic and modern function

I want to mention here what WordPress considers as trackback and what it actually is and how it works. I am going to continue using the example of the respective blogs of Pepito and Juanita. Hold on to the chair because curves are coming…

Juanita writes a super article about nutrition on her blog. Pepito reads it, and he wants to participate in the conversation in the comments, but at the same time he wants his readers to read to him and not Juanita, so it won’t include a link to Juanita’s blog, but it will send a manual trackback to her.

Without having a link to her website in Pepito’s article, Juanita receives via trackback (which has been sent manually) the notification that Pepito has mentioned her on his blog (although you and I both know that Pepito has actually cheated, and has not included a link to Juanita’s website).

In said trackback as a comment, Pepito has included a link to his own website, so if Juanita decides to publish said trackback as a comment on her article, Pepito will be receiving visitors hints through Juanita’s blog (more popular than his), but Juanita will not receive visitors to her website from Pepito’s website, although he claims in the trackback that he has mentioned her (but without a link to her website, which means no visits for her).

BREATHE.

What a pass right? Trackback here, trackback there…. How clever Pepito, who has used the trackbacks for their own benefit at the level of SEO, and of visits to your website, since being visited by people through a blog more popular than yours, Google will consider that your blog is important and will give it more importance in the search results…

And the famous pingbacks? This is where, nowadays, WordPress has changed the way of “notifying each other with trackbacks”.

Now, thanks to pingbacks, they can no longer be done traps (or at least harder) to benefit from the goodwill (or pointless automations) of popular website owners.

It is as simple to explain now as Pepito writes the article, and mentions Juanita’s article through a link.

Automatically (pingback), Juanita receives a notification on her website (trackback), where she can enter that link and see how she has been mentioned and thus decide what she wants to do with that mention.

The harsh reality of trackbacks and pingbacks in WordPress

In the previous section, I have told you an invented example with a scenario that is too ideal.

There are actually several things to consider in how trackbacks and pingbacks are used today:

There are several factors that influence the pingback to reach the mentioned website correctly.
The vast majority of pingbacks are spam.
If a website is popular, it will receive hundreds of daily trackbacks, and its moderation level can be very heavy and long, if you want to do it right.
If processes are automated (such as approving trackbacks automatically), your SEO can be affected since many trackbacks can be from SPAM websites.
Some pingbacks may go directly to the recipient’s SPAM folder.
The receiver may not have pingbacks activated on his website, so nothing will be coming to him.

Similarities and differences between a trackback and a pingback

Let’s see if we can differentiate them well now that we know them both.

When WordPress only used trackbacks to send notifications from web to web about specific content, as expected, that possibility was (and continues to be) abused and the level of spam in this sense it is almost 90%, thus turning this tool into something with very bad practices.

At the same time, to use it well, it was necessary to take into account that:

There was no verification in the trackbacks that came from one website to another (since they were manual).
The blog that received the trackback could edit its content on its own server, which made them very easy to fake.

For this and for many other technical reasons, WordPress decided to use pingbacks instead of trackbacks, in this sense.

The resemblance between a trackback and a pingback is basically its general function: notify between websites or blogs that someone has mentioned to another through a link on their website.

Think that the function is the same when you mention someone on Twitter, tag someone on Instagram or Facebook, or if you want to refer to someone in a conversation in Slack.

However, we find more than one difference between the two:

The notification mechanism is different, which makes pingbacks much more difficult to report.
The technology they both use to communicate webs is very different: pingbacks use something called XML-RPC and trackbacks use HTTPPOST (We won’t go into the details, but the technology trackbacks use makes them more likely to be spam victims.)
the pingbacks they do not send any contentthe trackbacks yes.
the pingbacks cannot be edited by the blogger who receives them.
trackbacks are manualswhile pingbacks are automatic.

Advantages and disadvantages of using pingbacks and trackbacks

Once the differences and similarities are clear, I can tell you about the advantages and disadvantages of using them.

Advantage

They have the potential to increase traffic to your website (especially if a very popular website pingbacks you).
you can build connections and “relationships” between blogs, to say, help each other in the world of the internet (make themselves known in a joint way for example).
They are good for him SEO in a utopian and ideal world in WordPress and on the Internet in general, where clean popularity comes into play and no SEO strategy based on spam and black hat or bad practices (take this advantage with a grain of salt).

Disadvantages

there is a lot spam. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot.
The moderation Of all the pingbacks you receive, it should ideally be manual (I explain this in more detail a bit further down).
The level of use at the “human” user level (not robot) is very limited, since for one website to receive a pingback from another, both have to have them activated. And the vast majority of times, if you have them activated (I’ll show you how to activate them below) you will receive a lot of spam.

Use Pingbacks for SEO and get traffic from them

Many blogs, even very famous ones, sometimes publish trackbacks that they receive from other blogs that are somewhat smaller or more humble.

If you know something about SEO (take a look at if you don’t) you will understand that a good SEO strategy is very important too. everything outside the web. That is, your popularity on the internet.

I will not go into the subject much, since it does not apply here, but so that you understand it quickly: if a popular website talks about you…