Does Pingback/Trackback hurt SEO?

[khtm]

I just had a thought -

Assuming that:

• One-way backlinks are better for SEO compared to reciprocal links
• A pingback is essentially a reciprocal link between two sites, right?

Wouldn't it be better if you're running a site, say with WordPress, that is getting pingbacks showing up in post comments...to delete them so they turn into one-way backlinks?

Thoughts?

Note - If you're not sure what Pingback is - Pingback - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Mark Brian]

Ping is not really a link, it's a notification to other sites that you've updated your content.

Edit. I think you're talking about trackbacks/pingbacks, I think it doesn't hurt SEO and I think it actually helps since it becomes a backlink. This is why spammers have deviced a way to abuse this WP feature, they do massive automatic trackbacks.

[khtm]

Yep I'm talking about pingbacks, not pings like using Pingomatic. But I suppose Trackbacks are treated the same by WordPress as well.

Here's an example that I've experienced; maybe this will make better sense:

1. I make a post in my blog about a certain topic
2. Someone on a forum references my post with its URL and uses the pingback or trackback field
3. The "comments" section underneath my post now has a new entry showing the pingback/trackback with the URL of the reference on the other forum
4. So basically now there's a link going from my post to this forum and a link going from the forum back to my post - reciprocal links

[Mark Brian]

Unless you are doing this specially for gaining massive backlinks then it shouldn't be a problem. Occasional reciprocal links won't hurt. You can however turn this off in WP if you don't like it. I've turned this off myself since I got spam trackback attacks.

[halfpoint]

I just wanted to bump this thread in hope that a few more people would chime in.

I've never used Wordpress up until recently, and now I keep getting emails to approve "pingback" comments.

My concerns are similar to the op of this thread so I'd love to hear some more opinions on this.

[logodesigner]

Trackbacks are good for internal linking.
If you think about this – it doesn’t really gel. A Trackback creates a two-way link – in a way, an uncontrolled two way link. If you want links flowing in one direction then a Trackback will certainly disturb this balance. Trackbacks can be good for displaying which posts are linking back. This can be handy data if you are trying to balance your internal data.

[halfpoint]

So would it be best to turn off trackbacks in Wordpress, from an SEO point of view?

[anildewani]

I think it would be better to turn it off if you really seek one way backlinks.

xt

[Frances Norah S]

Originally Posted by Pat Jackson

I just wanted to bump this thread in hope that a few more people would chime in.

I've never used Wordpress up until recently, and now I keep getting emails to approve "pingback" comments.

My concerns are similar to the op of this thread so I'd love to hear some more opinions on this.

My site is running on Wordpress and lately I've been getting more of these pingbacks eversince I started submitting articles to other blog networks. And I get emails asking me to approve these pingbacks. Should I approve them? The big question here is: Are these pingbacks beneficial for me in terms of SEO?

[kkchoon]

Trackback is another great way to build your SEO using wordpress platform.

There are software that will find keyword related blog post and allow you to pingback related articles, this not only help you create content but also get links from authority sites !

[Alexis Wilke]

Hmmm... That sounds contradictory to me...

I have always read that cross linking was not as good as one way linking.

So say I'm A and user B talks about one of my blog posts and adds a link, I have a B to A link. One way clean... Now he uses the Pingback feature and all of a sudden, instead of just a B to A link, there is also an A to B link from my comments area.

How can that help with search engines themselves? I understand that it can help people by finding that comment and clicking on the link back to the commentator who may (or may not) give me praises, but... looking at the SEO standpoint, it doesn't sound right to me?!

[Drewry_Media]

When you ping, I only recommend pinging no more than 3 times a day. if you do it too much, search engines think you are spamming and it might hurt you a little. Your best bet is to keep your content fresh and just ping less than 3 x daily...

[Alexis Wilke]

Drewry,

This is about backping, not ping. In other words, you don't do anything on your end, instead you receive new auto-comments that you can accept or refuse. The comment is a link back to another person's post.

khtm had a link in his 1st post to Wikipedia explaining exactly what it is...

[keepkalm]

I was just wondering about this myself. I wrote a Free SEO Advice post on my blog that got 7-8 trackbacks from a website that linked it from a couple of different pages.

I don't show trackbacks in my blog so I don't have to worry about it as much.

You don't want your posts linking to shady websites that are known for SPAM, so check out where the links are coming from if you publish trackbacks on your posts.

[Bill_Z]

While it may be good for traffic, I disable both pingbacks and trackbacks, just to be safe. I prefer the link juice of a one-way link as opposed to any traffic benefits.

[gittar1122]

Well there are people following the process of trackbacks by putting other's site link in their post. Once their trackback become approved on other site then they remove the link from their post to get oneway backlink

[iobeek]

I like it how webmasters think reciprocal links are useless

[srbilles]

I may be mistaken but I thought that trackbacks didn't pass any link juice. Which would make them unattractive for backlink purposes. Maybe someone with more knowledge about trackbacks could clarify.

[Shaun_micheal]

well i don't think so.
There is no such issue in pingbacks.

[nettech]

I'd switch it off since once these scraper tools find your site, you're going to get spammed to hell! I've switched it off and thankfully my inbox isn't full of Wordpress notifications!

[shineyvee]

I am quite new at article marketing and decided to trial Article Marketing Robot and managed to get one article I published on several article sites. It took me 2 days to realise that I had 25 comments on my Wordpress which I noticed were pingbacks. So I've ended up in this thread to try to work out whether these are good or not.

After a short rollercoaster of emotion from "What on earth is all this spam" to "hang on, all these people want to use my article to send traffic their own sites so I'll lose potential traffic" to "wow, all these people want to publish my article because it makes their site look good!" I came to the realisation that 24 of the pingbacks were actually the article sites which had published my article including my own links and therefore sent pingback for these backlinks. 1 of the pingbacks was someone who found my article and republished it on his site.

My questions therefore are:
Should I accept pingbacks from sites that have published my own article with links?
If I do accept then will that create 2 way linking which I get the general feeling is not very desirable?
If I don't accept, will my articles still be published on those sites?! I think they will still be on those sites, therefore this would be the best thing to do as then I have my valid one way links. But what about the guy who picked my article to republish - would it be honorable for me to 2-way link to him?

Thanks for any responses!
shineyvee

BTW I think I'm not really a fan of AMR after my trial - I feel so out of control where I signed up for loads of sites which I'm not sure are really that useful and my article about a health product made it to funny categories like "Royal Family"! Any thoughts on this welcome too.

[Alexis Wilke]

shineyvee,

You should accept the pingback from the one person who re-published your article and see whether the link (anchor) includes: rel="nofollow" (the rel[ative] attribute with nofollow). If so, then you are not passing juice.

The idea of the pingback is to interlink sites but to avoid passing juice because it is otherwise useless (i.e. his link to you is "canceled" whenever you link back without a "nofollow".)

The other pingbacks, if they don't point to a copy of your article, I would drop them.

Thank you.
Alexis Wilke

[sunbros]

According to me Ping is not really a link so its definitely going to hurt your seo techniques and results

[techmeaux]

I think it will be abused, and this kind of linking, like low level uselessness, will be filtered algorithmically by google, just like they dumped using metatag keywords in ranking page relevancy, and page rank, well atleast page rank. I think keywords were abused to the point of becoming meaningless to Google, (anyone know when?, or was it always that way?), and this will happen to backlinking from certain areas. I know a link to me from the NYTimes can't hurt, but these mass blasters, Google has that covered, IMO, and it's irrelevant to them, or filtered to irrelevancy in the algorithm.

[Drewry_Media]

It does a little bit in a sense, because when you publish a new post, search engines are mostly used to finding stuff on their own, and don't care to be notified about your new content.

[shineyvee]

Originally Posted by Alexis Wilke

shineyvee,

You should accept the pingback from the one person who re-published your article and see whether the link (anchor) includes: rel="nofollow" (the rel[ative] attribute with nofollow). If so, then you are not passing juice.

The idea of the pingback is to interlink sites but to avoid passing juice because it is otherwise useless (i.e. his link to you is "canceled" whenever you link back without a "nofollow".)

The other pingbacks, if they don't point to a copy of your article, I would drop them.

Thank you.
Alexis Wilke

Hi Alexis,

I'm afraid it took me a while to find your response, but I very much appreciate it.

I have been marking a lot of comments as spam because they clearly are by their lack of sense or suggestions of porn. For the article pingbacks though, I don't understand where to look for rel="nofollow". I have checked on the sites are they are simply re-publishing my article from some other source and include my original links in them.

Thanks
shineyvee

[ablife]

I use trackbacks / pingbacks all the time, they work great for getting quality relevant links back to a specific page, also great for targeting long tails in the post title.

[webmedia]

The Pingback system is a way for a blog to be automatically notified when other blogs link to it. It is entirely transparent to the blogger doing the linking, requiring no user intervention to work, and operates on principles of automatic discovery of everything that it needs to know.

[Alexis Wilke]

@Veronica,

Yes. You should definitively not publish links to porn unless your site is also about porn... And even though, you should be careful. 8-)

The rel="nofollow" is on your website. Once you accepted a pingback, it creates a link back to that other person's website and that link should not transmit juice otherwise you lose the juice being sent to you, if that makes any sense?

With Firefox, you can go over the link and right click your mouse button. Select Properties. In that window you see a "Relation: nofollow" if that entry is there. It means the juice doesn't go through and thus you have the type of link you wanted. I would imagine that all pingback software do that automatically, but you better verify... just in case.

[TheSEOmo]

I wouldn't turn them off, I would however heavily moderate them. Trackbacks are often used by spammers as a way of getting you to link to them. If they are sending you a trackback this should be an indicator that they have already linked to you which may or not be of some benefit to you but it will rarely benefit you to approve the trackback.

With that said if a valued reader or a great website writes something about one of your blog post you might choose to approve the trackback. If it's a great site this reciprocal linking could even benefit you.

[mori22]

Hi

i am considering purchasing a ping back software - my basic gut feeling is that ping backs have little to no seo value and also little to no traffic value.

the plugin is supposed to automatically find relevant blog posts on the net and create a link from my site (site A) to the site with the relevant post (site B) - hoping to receive a ping back from Site B to my site - Site A

1. is it true that most sites now automatically have a no follow tag installed as default - meaning the links that will be created from the blog post site (site B) to my site (site A) are useless as far as seo value goes?

2. does the link created by the ping back have any likelihood of generating traffic to my site - Site A (from Site B or in any other miraculous way)?

3. do you see any other value in such software - or would you just stick to one way links?

thanks so much

Mor