My WordPress clients ask me about the emails they receive that notify them of Pingbacks from one of their posts. Here’s how this happens:
- I post something on my blog that someone else likes.
- That person posts something on her own blog that includes a link referencing my post.
- This automatically sends a pingback to me (if we both have pingbacks enabled in our blogs).
- My blog receives the pingback, then automatically checks the other blog post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.
- I get an email informing me that I received a Pingback.
The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments. They occur when another blog post contains a link to one of your posts, and it’s like taking the conversation to a new site.
When one makes a new post, WordPress attempts to ‘ping’ all the sites that were included in your post. If the site happens to be one that accepts pings, such as another WordPress blog, then the two blogs communicate. The ‘pinged’ blog now logs a comment with a link to the site it was pinged from.
Pingbacks show in the Comments list, and contain a snippet of text from the other site
It is commonly believed that pingbacks don’t send any content, but this is not correct. If you get a pingback, you will see an excerpt from that blog in the Edit Comments section of your WordPress Dashboard. The issue is that not all themes display these excerpts from pingbacks. The default WordPress themes, for example, do not display pingback excerpts.
–Marc
February 1, 2015 @ 9:00 AM