Once you’ve been running your blog for any appreciable length of time, you’ll start to receive comments. Two special kinds of comments that can leave people scratching their heads are trackbacks and pingbacks. What are they and what do they mean to a small business owner’s website? And why do so many look like spam?
In a nutshell, both trackbacks and pingbacks link one blog post to a blog post on another website. Unfortunately, like comments, they also get abused by spammers. Let’s start with the basics and then give you some strategies for managing trackbacks and pingbacks.
Trackbacks
When you’re writing your blog post in WordPress, you’ll notice a special box on the Add/Edit Post page called trackbacks. That box accepts the complete path to a specific post on another website. Perhaps someone posted on their site an open question about “how do I generate more blog traffic?” On that post, if they do Trackbacks (and they might not – it’s an older system), you can copy and paste the Trackback URL for that post into that box and when you publish your post, they get a notification like a comment.
Pingbacks
The new system, pingbacks, is much easier to use. You include a link to the article in the text of your post. You highlight a phrase and add a link to the blog post on the other website. If they have pingbacks enabled, they’ll get a notice that you linked to them.
Comment Spam
Unfortunately, there are plenty of spammers that are abusing these tools. The spam I’ve seen lately is pingbacks to “link farms” – that means that when you follow the link back, the website you get to has a link to your article, and a bunch of links to other articles, but no substantive article itself. It’s just a collection of links. Don’t return the favor by approving that comment on your website. If Google finds a link farm link on your website, it can count against you. Don’t worry about your link showing up on the other website, but just don’t put their link on yours. Mark that comment as spam.
If you find you’re getting so many of these and it’s interfering with running your website, many people have taken to simply turning off trackbacks and pingbacks (in WordPress, Settings, Discussion, “Allow link notifications…”)
At the very least, you should have “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” or even better “An administrator must always approve the comment” checked in Discussion Settings.
So, what have been your experiences with trackback and pingbacks?
