[martin61]

Hello PIPS Friends,

:confused: I have received two different Pingbacks to my WordPress site for the first time. I have searched for an explanation on Pingback, but I am still not sure what exactly a Pingback is good for and if I should approve them. I am using the Akismet plugin and when I click on History of the Pingback it says: Akismet has cleared this comment. Does that mean that the Pingback is OK to approve? If I click on the link, the sender's site comes up and both their site titles are: Just another WordPress.com Site.
Could anyone please explain what a Pingback is and what to watch out for before approving? Your help would be appreciated. Thank you.

Cheers, Martin

[Allen Lundy]

Here is a pretty decent explanation of "Pinkback" ... Hope this helps!

What is a Pingback? Pingback Definition: Pingbacks vs Comments on Blogs

Allen

[mamchenkov]

Pingback is a notification that someone linked to your site.

First of all, they tell you that there is a link somewhere to something of yours. That is usually useful.

Secondly, pingbacks are like external comments. If, for example, you write a blog post and I want to comment on it, I can use comments on your site or I can write my own blog post in my own blog. That's like a distributed discussion.

When you receive a pingback notification, you should check the page from where it came. If there is indeed a comment or worthy mention of your content, that your visitors would benefit from reading, approve it. If that's just another spam website trying to get link backs and your visitors won't benefit in any case from visiting that site, don't approve it.

[Stephen Meyer]

Are you "Article Marketing" using any of the article distribution services or Article Directories? If you are and one of your articles get picked up by another publisher who post both the article and the resource box on a Wordpress site you will get an automatic "pingback" from the site.

Both Submityourarticle.com and Unique Article Wizard (and some others) have a free submission service for publishers where they automatically distribute categorized articles based on keywords to publishers. It's a simple way to get your article published on many sites. When one of the participating publishers post your article on a Wordpress site you get a pingback. Many of those sites are just generic content sites with no real focus where all the publisher wants is new content. These are usually Adsense sites where the intent is for visitors to click a Google add and they make a little money. Usually those sites will return the "Just another WordPress.com Site" title.


Also, if you post an article on your site and have a link in it pointing to another Wordpress site they will get a Pingback from you. All a pingback does is tell you someone has posted a link to your site on their site and it tells others you have posted a link to their site on yours.

I don't approve many pingbacks because they are kind of pointless and don't offer visitors any value.I also rarely, if ever, see any pingbacks my site has sent posted on other sites.

Just be aware of porn and hate sites. You don't want your articles or links posted on them (unless, of course, you do). I've found them and have asked the author to remove the link and they did.

[martin61]

Hello All,

Thank you all for your great info about Pingback. All your comments are really helpful. Thanks again.

Cheers, Martin