Wordpress Pingbacks and Trackbacks

What are pingbacks and trackbacks. There seems to be a lot of confusion over what pingbacks and trackbacks are and whether or not they are important, Let me explain them. What are pingbacks when you are notified of other websites linking to your post. For example, John writes an interesting article on his Web log. Martha reads John's article and comments about it, linking back to John's original post. Using pingback, Martha's software can automatically notify John that his post has been linked to, and Martha's software can then include this information on her site. what are trackbacks

In a nutshell, A trackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, "This is something you may be interested in." To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B".

A better explanation is this:

• Person A writes something on their blog.
• Person B wants to comment on Person A's blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog
• Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A's blog
• Person A's blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B's post

The idea here is that more people are introduced to the conversation (both Person A's and Person B's readers can follow links to the other's post), and that there is a level of authenticity to the trackback comments because they originated from another weblog. Trackbacks are very important and you should use them when you are discussing what you have seen on someones blog or if you want to link back to them. wordpress is automatically configured to give pingbacks when you link to another post in your post the other person will get notified that you have written about their post. Source: http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#Managing_Comments