Chandell Asuncion

What are Trackbacks and Pingbacks?
Trackbacks and Pingbacks are powerful research communication tools that will notify authors that you have something to say in your blog about their published blog post, or vice-versa. The author must have their blog setup to “allow pings” in order for them to receive a notification.

• Use a pingback when you link to an authors article,
• Use a trackback if you did not provide a link back to the authors article, but you want them to be able to read your comments, and the comments from your blog visitors.

How do I use a Trackback and a Pingback?
Once you setup your blog preferences to allow pings (see image) all you have to do is add a url (of the original article) to your post. WordPress will notify the author. If you are not going to add a link (back to the original article) for your users, you need to paste the url(s) in the “trackbacks” field, so that WordPress can contact the author.

Step-by-Step Trackback Instructions

1. Copy the URL of the “really good post“
2. Write a new post in your own blog, add a title and your personal comments.
3. Paste the URL in the “Trackbacks” field
4. Append the “trackback” between two slashes - i.e. ”/trackback/”
5. Save and publish your post
6. Wordpress will “ping” the author, and notify and provide them a trackback to your post (comments about their article)

Using Pingbacks and Trackbacks: Linking to someone elses work
Here I’m adding a link to two different blog articles, “10 Video Tutorials for Learning Basic Web Design Skills“; written on Mashable.com, and “Why Johnny’s Professor Can’t Read“; by Will Richardson. Adding a visible link to the article creates a pingback. In addition I would like the author to be able to read all of the comments that are posted to my blog so I’ll also create a trackback (see instructions above). The pingback will notify the author, the trackback will allow the author to have a link posted in their blog, that tracks my post and all of the comments made to my post from their site. This is pretty powerful. While it respects the rights of the original author, it also recognizes the new  author and his audience.

Example 1: Shows the name of the Blog author (see yellow highlight) in their blog trackbacks section. I entered the following url in the trackbacks field when writing my blog post. http://mashable.com/2008/06/12/web-design-tutorials/trackback/

Example 2: This blog shows the entire “trackback comment post” and indicates comments that are added as a trackback in comments section. I entered the following url in the trackbacks field when writing my blog post. http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/why-johnnys-professor-cant-read/trackback/

Notice that in both examples I had to append “/trackback/” to the url in order for my blog post to show as a comment on their site.

Using Pingbacks and Trackbacks: Someone is linking to my work

Putting up a Blog is a lot like putting up a Web site, it might be on the internet, but until you advertise it, it is sitting out there without any customers/readers/users.  Using Pingbacks and Trackbacks on your own blog allows you to get a feel for the people in your audience, and to learn what articles are important to them. You’ll learn more about the people you are sharing with, what they write about, and who they reach out to.

 
Example 3: Email notice – One of  your readers has posted a blog entry (with a trackback) on their site, that refers to something that you wrote in your  blog.

Example 4: This example shows what a trackback comment looks like in the KS blog.

Working Within the Walls of a School  

After all of this, I have to say.. somethings just don’t work when you are working within the walls of a school or large institution.  If you are using a KS blog, and have all of the settings mentioned above set, you will receive trackbacks, however pingback notices don’t arrive. However if you are using pingbacks on a personal blog, the information above should work. I have included the dictionary definitions for trackback and pingback below.

Wordpress Glossary Definition of Trackback:
Trackback helps you to notify another author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog, even if you don’t have an explicit link to his article. This improves the chances of the other author sitting up and noticing that you gave him credit for something, or that you improved upon something he wrote, or something similar. With pingback and trackback, blogs are interconnected. Think of them as the equivalents of acknowledgements and references at the end of an academic paper, or a chapter in a textbook.

Wordpress Glossary Definition of Pingback:
Pingback lets you notify the author of an article if you link to his article (article on a blog, of course). If the links you include in an article you write on a blog lead to a blog which is pingback-enabled, then the author of that blog gets a notification in the form of a pingback that you linked to his article.

If you’re feeling really geeky you may want to check out the Pingback technical specification.