WordPress Pingbacks and Trackbacks - what’s the difference?
If you write a blog post that links to another blog post (or sometimes just web page) and you have everything set up right, a pingback sends a notification to that target blog with information about your post.
A trackback can be sent even if you don’t link to the target post - you have to enter the ‘trackback url’ of the target blog post in the relevant input field (’Send trackbacks to’) when writing your post - which will give the same result. A blog will generally supply the link location for trackbacks to its posts.
You’ve got to have pingback and trackback notification enabled in your blog (admin > options > discussion) and the target blog has to be ping/trackback enabled.
The target blog may or may not publish your ping/trackbacks. If you’re just pinging for the sake of appearing, you get a link, yes, but very likely a nofollow one, these days.
These are a way of hooking up blogs, hopefully with a common area of interest - they do get misused and often nowadays a blog will publish ping/trackbacks separately from user comments, if at all.
Pingbacks have nothing to do with a TCP/IP ping (ie. send a ping to test whether a site is up) - it wasn’t the best ever choice of name.
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Hello World « Colin Eberhardt’s Adventures in WPF — November 27, 2008 @ 8:47 am
[…] crafting into an article, or if I simply do not have the time. Now all I have to do is learn the difference between trackbacks and pingbacks and I can get started […]
October 10, 2008
6:24 am
Rob said
Like the “want a gravatar” question and added it to your alpen3col theme. Maybe you should put it in the standard if you update the theme in the future? (or I have to remember what to change
).
October 10, 2008
12:19 pm
Lewis Wolfe said
Well, the idea was stolen from elsewhere, I may get round to including it in themes, yes - the problem with promoting gravatars is that they are automattic/wordpress.com not wordpress.org open source, ie commercial.
Have already complained about the demand for gravatar support as a condition of inclusion in wordpress.org codex themes… to no purpose.