Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They?
[This is a guest authored post By RT Cunningham of Untwisted Vortex. I do not think RT needs any introduction in the blogging world, that is because from May 2006 till today, he has written 769 articles that have been viewed for over 500,000 times! Look in his Top Posts. RT's topics range from Blogging Tips to Celebrities to Marketing and Promotion and he even has posts on Philippines Government since he has been living in Philippines for some time now. As a matter of fact, I believe just about everyone who goes to his site will end up spending hours and come away completely entertained as well learning something new. I am glad I found RT's site and if you haven't yet visited his site, please do. You'll be glad you did. Thanks so much for agreeing to write for this blog RT. This post will be submitted to Darren's month long project for building a better blog].
It surprises me to read items on social networks where it’s obvious the writers don’t know what “links”, “backlinks”, “pingbacks” and “trackbacks” are. I can understand it coming from non-website owners, but from people who write on blogs everyday? While researching this topic, the only thing I could come up with is that the information surrounding these terms just isn’t publicized enough. We need to change that. I’ll help with the change by explaining what they are and the “how and why” of increasing the ones that count. Below is an example of what linking and interlinking amongst various sites will look like. 
Links, also called hyperlinks, are links to other blogs. Simple enough, right? Generally, links refer only to outbound links. Links from your blog to another. There’s another term for inbound links, which are different from outbound links. Links can produce pingbacks if they’re used properly.
Backlinks refer to inbound links. Some writers call them “linkbacks” but that’s incorrect. The search engines call them backlinks and so should we. If a backlink comes from another blog, chances are it will have pinged your blog. If the ping pointed to a specific article, your blog will normally have produced a pingback in the comment section.
A pingback is probably the most confusing term of all. When you post an article and there’s even one link in that article, the software will ping that link (provided you have your software properly set up). If that link happens to point to a specific page on a blog, and the blog is set up to accept pings (some aren’t), a pingback will appear in the comments section of that blog. If the link doesn’t point to a specific page, no pingback can occur. You can still see if the ping went through to the blog by looking at the “blog reactions” on Technorati. If you want to track this information for your own blog, I suggest you to become a member of Technorati and claim your blog there, if you haven’t already done so.
A trackback is almost the same as a pingback. The difference is that your blog doesn’t have to link to the other blog in the article itself. There’s usually a separate spot in the software designed specifically for sending pings to trackback URLs. If the ping goes to a specific page on the other blog, a trackback will appear in the comments section of that block.
The WordPress blog software is set up to do all these things the right way, in its default configuration. Other software and hosted blog services may not be set up properly and will require customization steps. Andy Beard has some excellent articles on how to send a trackback with Blogger.
I notice a lot of blog writers are hesitant about including links in their articles. The contrary should be true. You can’t increase pingbacks without linking out to other blogs. When you link out to other blogs, whether the links produce pingbacks or not, it gets the attention of the owners of the other blogs (and their readers if there happens to be a pingback there). The owners and the readers will sometimes pay a visit to your blog. In my experience, they visit more often than not, just to see what you’re up to. Do not use trackbacks if you can help it. While they can do some good for your blog, they do nothing for the blogs you send them to.
In case you haven’t heard of it, there is a growing movement on the Internet that includes bloggers who want to give credit to other blogs via the comments section of their blogs. They have installed special plugins to remove the “rel=nofollow” tag from comment author URLs, pingbacks and trackbacks. Once again, Andy Beard wrote a great article on the dofollow movement.
This is why linking to other blogs is important. If you link to an article (also called deep linking) on a blog that has the nofollow tag disabled, the pingback becomes a backlinks for you! Now, I’m not saying that you should target only those blogs. You should target any blog where the link is relevant to your article. However, you can create “speed link” articles to make all the links in those articles relevant. Take a look at one of my infamous blog drive-bys for an example of how it can be done. As a matter of fact, this article will produce three pingbacks as backlinks!
The purpose behind all of the terms I just went over is to increase traffic. Linking produces traffic. Linking produces backlinks and that’s how our blogs are found by non-bloggers (and even some bloggers). Linking is important!
Over 1,000,000 times? Are you sure? Dang! Now I have to go back and count. :-)
Details, details, details, hehehe.
I’m so happy that you posted this information, Pearl. I was just in a conversation with Mr Beard about this yesterday and of course, I forgot most of it so reading has slapped my cognition into gear once again. I’m pretty sure it’s in granny gear but what the heck, it’s still a forward gear.
Love ya, Toots and thanks again and thanks to Andy for announcing this post by giving it a thumbs up on Stumble Upon.
*Hugs to All*
hey RT.. well even 500,000 views is an impressive stat there :) thanks for clearing it all up for us n00bs…
oh he did?? :) I haven’t seen it yet … although Ive been on SU …. Although I saw Andy on my widget, he didn’t say a word here :P
Saboma – thanks for stopping by and always giving encouraging comments :) *HUGS* to you too…. I know you are doing wonderful …. keep coming back ….. we all love ya…
[...] Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They? by pearl [...]
[...] Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They? by pearl [...]
[...] Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They? by pearl [...]
Pearl,
Thanks for all that great info!
Regards,
Jeanne
hey Jeanne – thanks for stopping by and commenting! RT did a great job with this post too just like he does on his own blog! tc and please do visit again!
[...] Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They? by pearl [...]
[...] Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They? by pearl [...]
[...] Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They? by pearl [...]
[...] Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They? by pearl [...]
This was a very readable, interesting and educating post Pearl as it really sorts out the different subjects and unimportance of links in blogsphere.
I hope you don’t mind if I add some of my thoughts:
1: Wouldn’t you say it is good to ping your blog yourself? I know some, like Technorati, does it automatically if your registered, but some doesn’t. I use http://pinger.blogflux.com/ as it includes the most. Do you have any experience?
2: WP Dashboard also show all ‘Incoming Links’ and I find it very useful to keep track of it.
Btw: I’ve favored yours on Technorati of course:-)
RennyBA, pingomatic is setup with the default installation, options/writing, but I use FeedBurner’s pingshot now. The ping from the blog goes there and about 30 minutes later, pingshot pings the rest. BlogCatalog show RSS excerpts and doesn’t get pinged by any of the services. So, you have to add their rpc address to the writing option in addition to whatever service you use. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with pinging yourself manually. It’s just time consuming.
The incoming links on the dashboard are read using an API from Technorati.
Hey RennyBA and RT…… I recently also added some more services in the options section from this link: http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services
and at Ken Xu’s recommendation in this post : http://blogs.mysites-advisor.com/index.php/2007/07/20/post-update-services-for-wordpress/
what’s your opinion on it RT?
I’ve seen the first link and I’m checking out the second link now.
Most of the update services listed are covered either by rpc.pingomatic.com or Feedburner’s Pingshot (where you can also tell it to add pingomatic and newsgator). I recommend using FeedBurner for your feeds, using the plugin they have available at their website to redirect your feeds to them. Then using Pingshot to ping all the other services. It’s owned by Google now, so you know it’s going to just get better.
I’ve been using FeedBurner for a few months now and only encountered problems at the beginning, and most of those problems were caused by my web host.
I do use feedburner plugin…. and I also saw some problems in the beginning but now seems to be working fine! I am not sure where the problem was occurring though and then it started working on its own! thanks for answering questions here RT!!
Heh, I had no idea whether you did or not. It was a general statement to anyone reading.
Gosh my English ;) I know you are simply suggesting and I meant to say – I use that plug in too :) forgive me for its my 2nd lang! :)
Your second language is better than some people’s first. :-) I never would have guessed.
great post RT….and thanks for featuring it Pearl…..I am still dazed and confused here as I am pathologically challenged when it comes to these technicalities…..but I will check out the feedburner features as I know that I use that… :]]
Je prendrais une perle de conjecture et le Français de parole est-il votre deuxième langue ? ? ? ?
Aucun Kim….
le Français n’est pas ma première langue ;)
Je ne dirai pas ce qu’est ma première langue :)
lol
Nice article to get a blogger up and running.
thanks for stopping by Danny… glad you like the article :) tc and kit
I concur with Danny. I’ve been blogging for a month now and I was struggling to see the point of trackbacks compared to pingbacks. Nice to have some validation that I’m doing things the right way!
Cheers
~biff~
Damn you! I was just getting ready to write an article along these lines… Grrr….
Ah, thanks. Some of us who are new to the blogging scene (me) were a little confused about the terminology. This definitely helps…
Awesome post, the use of images certainly helped things to be a little clearer
A picture is worth a thousand words
haha Pearl
so elf language is your first language eh???
Thank you SO much for this article. It cleared up a lot for me. I even posted on my own blog about it. Feel free to stop by. Thanks again!
@Nakedbif… glad you liked it :)
@Steve… sorry :-) you can still write about it and like RT mentioned, link to this post ;)
@ Sam…. glad you liked it too ;)
@ Glen …. thanks … and im glad it cleared things up
@ Marie… thanks again :)
Welcome to all of you to my blog – and thanks for stopping by!! do visit again!
Please thank RT for writing such an awesome post :)
I will be visiting your blogs soon!! tc and kit guys!
Hey Kim :) what can ii say? there is no widget that’ll translate my elf language :D
Hi Pearl,
Great article by RT which should be invaluable to many bloggers and help them to grasp the idea of linking better. It should also help them when doing any of the assorted memes which are abound at present, but used correctly they can produce excellent results.
Many thanks to RT for clarifying this :o)
right… this is a simple concept but we all forget to do to the right way… now I wish RT could be a regular writer here ;)
great article and some good points.
BeckS
thanks for stopping by Becky :) Im glad you liked the article… tc and kit
[...] Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They? by pearl [...]
This is definitely helpful to newbs at blogging. I had no idea what a trackback was when I first began. Neither did my webmaster, but he’s not a blog reader.
Going to have to look into Feedburner, this is new to me. Thanks for the post RT, and Pearl for posting it =)
Added you into my blogroll, Fave you in technorati and i have given you a stumble on your your article! Share the love!
[...] I've even been checking out her Alexa statistics. When I wrote it, I had no idea that "Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They?" would bring in so much traffic. Had I known, I probably would have published it on my blog. [...]
I’m back to thank you for your replay and additional information. This is very educating to me and I wanna thank RT too for his ping officiant information. I did not know the limitation of BC pings.
I use Feedburner too of course and have bookmarked my ping url.
Btw: Your on my blogroll as your perspectives is always a great read:-)
@Deborah – this was a great article and is still topping my most commented articles :) you’ve got to put that RSS chicklet showing your subscribers there … I am sure you have a lot of them!!
@Etienne – thanks for everything… I will certainly add you too! tc and kit
@RennyBA – good to have you back and thanks for the add… :) and thanks for reading too… tc and kit..
[...] Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks – What Exactly Are They? by pearl [...]
[...] more detail explanation on Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks , check out Interesting Ovservations’s [...]
[...] to do so by using third-party solutions. As I explained in a guest article I wrote for Pearl at Interesting Observations, pings create pingbacks. A ping is created either by a link within a post or by a specific [...]
I find that the trackbacks tend to clog up the comments sections. If you look at the ones above, all they do is repeat part of the post that you’ve just read except they put a [...] at the beginning and end.. While I’m all for links and everything, I don’t like clutter.
Ghillie Suits’s last blog post..Photos of the Ultra Light Ghillie Suit – Woodland
[...] would agree to write for my blog and he was nice enough to agree to do so and wrote a mini tutorial Pings and Trackbacks. The article was very well written and since I submitted his article to Darren’s 31 days to [...]
OK, so now I understand, but all I understand is that I’m thoroughly confused…. LOL I will figure it all out and write blogs that will eventually promote me, and hence what ever I’m promoting. ..LOL
Backlinks are key to increasing your search engine popularity LinkPartnerExpress is the best on the web…I have 6500 links, all quality!!
Thanks for such a detailed article. But its more than a year old.
Has anything changes since then !!