What do ‘pingback’ and ‘track back’ mean?

Cross-linking is one of the most important success factors for a blog. Expanding your reach, i.e. your audience, can be difficult without the co­oper­a­tion and support of partners and other bloggers. By sub­mit­ting content in the form of guest com­ment­ar­ies or links to other blogs, you may be surprised how quickly this extra coverage can have a positive impact on your blog’s visitor numbers. Allowing external content to be posted on your blog may also help; if nothing else, it might act as a source of in­spir­a­tion for your own future content.

One popular method for building up such con­nec­tions between other blogs relies on two linking tech­niques known as pingbacks and track­backs. These allow you to link relevant content from your own blog in the comments section of other blogs by sharing your opinion or offering ad­di­tion­al in­form­a­tion. This linking process happens auto­mat­ic­ally with the help of pingbacks, while track­backs - and embedding a link from an external blog into one of your own entries - are manually placed. As a side benefit to this process, readers are given access to ad­di­tion­al in­form­a­tion on the topic they’re reading about, meaning all parties benefit.

Track­backs were ori­gin­ally developed for the blogging software Moveable Type and im­ple­men­ted for the first time in 2002. In sub­sequent years, the method has been made available for other blogging software. Their function is best explained using an example. Es­sen­tially, track­backs enable Blogger A to inform Blogger B whenever they’ve ref­er­enced one of B’s articles. To this end, Blogger A inserts a notice in the comments section of the original blog entry in­dic­at­ing that they’ve also produced some in­ter­est­ing content on the topic. As a part of this process, Blogger A also attaches their trackback URL, which can then be read under Blogger B’s entry. Generally, Blogger A will have also included a link to Blogger B’s weblog in the text he’s produced for his own blog. In order for a trackback to be placed, both parties have to support and activate the function.

Pingbacks are a newer, automated version of track­backs, and they’re placed via blogging software whenever a blogger makes a reference to external content in one of their articles. The author of the original, linked content also auto­mat­ic­ally receives a generated notice of the link placed in the comments section. In order for this procedure to work, both blog systems need to support and allow pingbacks; some popular names that support this feature are Sil­ver­Stripe, Drupal, and WordPress. What’s more, internal blog entries are also linked with pingbacks. These so-called ‘self-pings’ can be de­ac­tiv­ated at any time if they’re no longer desired. 

A direct com­par­is­on between these two blog-linking pro­ced­ures demon­strates why pingbacks play a sub­stan­tially larger role today than track­backs. The automatic nature of pingbacks alone is one major advantage of this function: as the replying blogger, it spares you of the effort of having to track down the necessary trackback URLs and stops you from for­get­ting to link content. The general pref­er­ence towards the newer method can also be un­der­stood after taking a better look at one of the trackback method’s less favorable char­ac­ter­ist­ics: given that this procedure requires users to place links them­selves, the trackback function is par­tic­u­larly at­tract­ive for spammers looking to leave behind ref­er­ences to content that clearly lack any con­sist­ency to a given blog’s theme. What makes this all the more ir­rit­at­ing is that these links don’t generate any valuable backlinks for the original author. Removing such spam track­backs can be a time-consuming endeavour and also requires the support of ad­di­tion­al plugins.

There is, however, one crucial advantage to track­backs—at least when it comes to the referring blogger: given that they, unlike pingbacks, only act as a no­ti­fic­a­tion for the external blogs they’re found in and also display the blog’s name, URL, and an excerpt of the related content, track­backs provide much greater ad­vert­ising op­por­tun­it­ies. In principle, these ad­di­tion­al comments can also mean more content for blog operators. But there’s also the potential threat of cyber criminals using this method to sneak malicious code into the comments section. Main­tain­ing a constant vigil remains the only pre­vent­at­ive measure for such risks. 

Both methods for linking blogs are at­tract­ive when it comes to search engine op­timi­ation. In terms of link building, you’d be hard pressed to find a more efficient solution for bloggers, provided that track­backs and pingbacks, including their in­ter­con­nec­ted themes and links, have been properly im­ple­men­ted into the blogs they’re sup­port­ing. The biggest problem is that bloggers are in­creas­ingly tagging their published track­backs and pingbacks with the ’nofollow’ attribute, which causes them to no longer be included into a search engine’s link pop­ular­ity cal­cu­la­tion. If both bloggers and their blogging systems support these methods, then the following factors have a positive effect on their blogs’ re­spect­ive rankings:

• The author that’s cited as a source builds a backlink, which is im­ple­men­ted into the blog entry of another blogger. Through the com­ment­ary provided in that same entry, the cited author also receives ad­di­tion­al content for their own blog.
  
  
• The blogger who referred to the original author by citing them as a source in their entry builds a backlink, which is placed in the comments section of the original blog.