What Is A Pingback? Are Pingbacks Good For Your Blog’s SEO?

What Is A Pingback? Are Pingbacks Good For Your Blog’s SEO?

Pretty much every blogger knows what a comment is, but when it comes to defining what a “pingback” is, even the online blogging community is a little less certain of the meaning. So what is a pingback? Are pingbacks good for your website SEO?

WordPress Blogging & What a Pingback Is

Pingbacks are specific to the WordPress community, so if your blog is not hosted on WordPress I guess you can be excused for not knowing what a pingback is. Similar to comments, pingbacks are a way in which one blogger can link his or her blog to another blog. If you’re talking about pingbacks and another blogger is talking about trackbacks, it makes sense that you’d want to link to that blog, right? That’s why WordPress created the pingback, see!

How do I pingback to another blog?

So pingbacks sound pretty cool, right? How do you pingback? Lucky for you, pingbacks are created automatically whenever you link to another WordPress blog in your blog. You might be pingbacking already without even realizing it–as long as the blogs you’re linking to have pingbacks enabled, that is. You can Follow these steps to enable pingbacks on your WordPress blog, but you should keep reading to make sure you really want to do that first.

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Reciprocal Linking: Pingbacks and SEO

As most successful bloggers and SEOs already know, getting more links to your blog is one of the best ways to get more traffic and/or money from your website. Using WordPress pingbacks is a good way to get more links to your blog. If you link to another WP website, you automatically get a reciprocal link back from them, usually on the sidebar or bottom of their page. Pingbacking is kind of like a game of ping pong: you pass an easy link out there, and it will get volleyed right back to you. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right?

We’ve established that pingbacks are a good way for similar WordPress blogs to get reciprocal links and form a blogging community, but does this mean you should enable pingbacking and have all of your pingbacks listed on the sidebar of your WordPress blog? Is pingbacking really a good SEO and internet marketing tactic?

While pingbacks sound good in theory, spammers have found a way to abuse the pingback, like so many things in SEO. If you have automatic pingbacks set up on your blog, any site that links to you will get a link back to their site right on your blog post, no matter how spammy. These kind of low quality pingbacks could eventually hurt the integrity and trust of your own blog in Google’s and other search engines eyes, not help it. Simply put, pingbacks could have the opposite effect that you want them to have, so proceed pingbacking with caution!

Should You Enable Pingbacks?

So should you allow pingbacks on your WordPress blog? It depends. While the pingback is an easy way to get links and build up your link profile, you could trash your website if you’re not careful. For professional bloggers, the best way to use pingbacks is to monitor them often. If you see things getting out of control, you probably want to disable automatic pingbacking and only display authentic pingbacks on your blog.

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