The Pingback and Trackback features were developed primarily for communication between bloggers on WordPress sites, so that blogs and sites are alerted when part of their content is quoted on other sites.
These two processes, Pingback and Trackback, are similar to the process of sharing posts on social media platforms, and they are among the oldest WordPress technologies. They were developed with the beginnings of the WordPress system, and they are considered a type of backlinks.
A backlink is any link on another website that points to your site. It is no secret that its presence is considered one of the most important factors in improving your site’s SEO and helps it appear in the first search engine results. Referring to your site from other sites enhances the presence of your site’s content on search engines and gives it greater credibility.
In this article, we will talk about the terms Pingback and Trackback, their definition, and the basic differences between them. We will also talk about the pros and cons of using them on WordPress sites and how you can control them to make the best use of your site.
What is Trackback?
The Trackback feature was launched for the first time in August 2002 by the founder of Movabletype . It was designed to provide notifications between websites. At that time, it was limited only to Movabletype, but it increased in spread after that and various blogging platforms began, including WordPress. In using it.
The Trackback feature allows WordPress website owners to communicate between websites. It is a feature that must be set manually on your site through the settings of the main control panel in WordPress, as it is not activated by default.
The meaning of the word Trackback is to follow backwards, as if something returns again to its original source, but how is this done? You will understand more about the concept of trackback through this scenario:
1- For example, the WordPress website publishes a new article.
2-As the owner of a blog on WordPress, you want to comment on this article and you also want your site’s readers to see this comment.
3- In this case, you will write an article on your blog on WordPress, and send a trackback to the WordPress site in Arabic.
Note : As we mentioned previously, the default WordPress settings do not allow you to send a Trackback while writing an article, and we will explain to you in the following paragraphs how to activate this feature.
4- The WordPress in Arabic website will receive your track pack, and will consider this request and decide whether to approve it or not. If the comment is approved, the comment in WordPress in Arabic will consist of a title, an excerpt, and a link to your WordPress blog.
What is pingback?
To understand the Pingback feature, we can liken it to comments on social media platforms. When your blog takes excerpts from another site, this site is notified that you have used a paragraph of their content, and this is done automatically, unlike the trackback, which must be manually set to work. Thus, Pingback can be considered the automatic version of Trackback with a few differences.
You will be able to understand the term Pingback more through this scenario:
1- Let us assume that the WordPress Arabic website has published a new article.
2-Then the owner of a blog or website (A) published an article on his blog www.exampleA.com , and in this article he placed a link to the article on the WordPress website in Arabic.
3_ Then, if both sites provide the WordPress site in Arabic and Site A for the Pingbacks feature, then the pingback notification will be sent to the WordPress site in Arabic and it will appear in the comments section.
4- After the WordPress site receives this message, a confirmation is sent to site (A) by publishing this site’s comment on the published article, and the comment will be a link to site (A’s) article.
What is Self-PING?
Pingback can work on your site, meaning that if you reference part of an article on your blog in another article, WordPress will send a Pingback to your site itself. In this case, this process is called (Sels-Ping).
But be careful because if you are constantly blogging and citing your old posts, you may find that (Self-Ping) is an annoying procedure due to the large number of notifications that you receive, and in this case you can control its closure from the settings of the main control panel in WordPress.
But there is a benefit to SelF-Ping, which is to encourage your site visitors to read your old content that may no longer appear to visitors. Thus, the visitor spends more time on your site, and may find in your old content something that interests him more than the new one, which makes him a permanent visitor to your site.
What is the difference between Pingback and Trackback?
In fact, there is not much difference between the concepts of (Trackback) and (Pingback), but they both follow a slightly different way of working, and the difference between them lies in two points:
First: The difference in communication technology , as Trackback is set manually, while Pingback works automatically.
Second: The form of the alert differs : in the case of (Ping Back), the alert is sent without any content in the message, but in the case of (Track (Back), the alert is sent with excerpts of the content.
Pros of using Pingback and Trackback in WordPress
After seeing the advantages of using Ping backs/ Track backs, you will know why some WordPress users prefer them; The most prominent of these positives are:
1 – Increase the value of the content you provide: Promoting content related to the topic of your posts increases its value and expresses your passion for what you provide and your interest in citing other references.
2 – Increase the credibility of your site: Reference to your site by websites, especially reliable and famous ones, increases the credibility of your site and builds trust with your audience.
3- Increase traffic via back links: If a popular website publishes your pingbacks and trackbacks in the comments section, this would lead to increased traffic to your website.
4 – Improving your appearance in search engines (SEO): Since Pingback and Trackback are essentially back links, as we mentioned, they of course help you improve search engines (SEO), provided that you link to reliable sites (and not to unwanted sites or unknown sites). Spam).
Read also: Inserting links on your site to enhance the user experience and improve your site’s SEO.
5 – Build relationships with brands: Since Pingback and Trackback show the other website owner that you want to share their content, this may lead to your content being shared by them as well, which is naturally beneficial for increasing traffic and building relationships with brands. In your field.
Disadvantages of using Pingback and Trackback in WordPress
Despite the advantages of Pingback and Trackback mentioned previously, unfortunately spammers exploit them to a great extent, which has caused them many disadvantages, including:
1 – Spam: Spam senders use tracking and resending operations to send a large amount of random content to a large number of sites.
Trackback spam is one of the five most common types of spam according to CognitiveSEO . This is why we may find that using them on the site causes random content to increase by the thousands, causing confusion for website owners.
2- Weakening your performance with respect to search engines: If you leave the Pingback and Trackback features unmonitored, and spammers are able to exploit this point to make a trackback of their content through your site, it will appear to the search engine as if you are the one trying to publish spam content and not them, which will negatively affect the search engine. Your website’s SEO!
3- Distorting the brand’s reputation: The presence of bad links on your site that lead to pornographic sites or sites for suspicious businesses will naturally destroy the reputation of your brand, and you of course do not want that.
4 – Consuming more time: The main challenge with Pingback and Trackback is filtering out the presence of random content in them, and therefore modifying them may take more time, which is time that you can better use in developing other aspects of your site’s SEO to improve its performance.
5- Annoying Self Pingback: If you reference other posts on your blog, WordPress will automatically generate pingbacks, which can become annoying over time especially if you are constantly creating many internal links. You can solve this problem by using the No Self Pings add-on .
Therefore, if your site is exposed to a lot of random content through these two features, it is better to disable them on your site and avoid their negative effects.
How do you send a Trackback to another site?
In order to be able to send a trackback to a site from your WordPress site, you must first have a link to the content you want to reference on this site (Content URL). You can get the trackback on your WordPress site by placing (/trackback/) at the end of the link. Permanently copy the article you want to refer to in your post and send a message alerting this site that you have used part of its content, then copy it into the Writing Excerpt section, as in the following image, then click Publish.
How to modify Pingback and Trackback in WordPress?
It’s very simple, all you have to do is go to the main WordPress dashboard > choose Settings from the side toolbar > then click Discuss .
Activate or disable the option ( allow link notifications from other blogs, “PingBacks” and “TrackBacks” in new articles )
How do you modify the Send Track Back and Ping Back feature in posts?
To do this, you must go to Settings while writing the post, and activate or disable the option ( Allow notifications and comments ):
With this, we have reached the end of our article, in which we explained everything related to the concepts of Pingback and Trackback in WordPress, and showed the disadvantages and advantages, and how to control them.
Now it’s up to you and what you want to achieve; Remember that if you use them correctly, you can increase your website traffic and enjoy their benefits. But if you leave it unattended and uncontrolled, this may lead to more spam and other problems that you do not need.
