The Geeky Guide to WordPress – Pingbacks and how they work

As I’ve been doing this blogging thing a little while now and it seemed a good idea to pass on a few of the things that I’ve learned over the five years that I’ve been doing this. In easy and often geeky steps you’ll be taken through the steps and point out the pitfalls of taking your blog seed and growing it into something really amazing.

Pinbacks – this is where one blogger creates a link to another bloggers page or post. The useful thing about this is that the host (i.e. the page or post being linked to) blogger is informed about this, hence the term pingback.

It seems there’s confusion and distress about how to make pingbacks work, so being the helpful chap I am this post is going to help you guys create pingbacks that work and show you some of the uses for them.

Creating a Pingback

This is dead easy when you understand a couple of points, you’re essentially making a hyperlink to another bloggers page or post, not their main site. For example if you created a pingback to my mainpage https://sfarnell.wordpress.com/ I would not know anything about this, it wouldn’t show up on my notifications, it might show up something if I looked carefully at my stats page but really nothing that shouts at me.

Let’s create a pingback to my Manic Monday post, hit the insert / edit link button

If I now put this:

https://sfarnell.wordpress.com/2018/05/21/manic-monday-number-19-what-do-i-do-now/

in both the URL and Link Text fields (because why not and don’t forget to tick the Open link in a new window / tab) Add Link and the hyperlink is there.

When the post with this link on it is published I will get a beautiful, lovely pingback.

That’s it.

Using Pingbacks

Pingbacks are used to highlight or assign credit when using another bloggers work. It’s polite and nice to do this becasue if referring to someone else’s work it’s generally good manners to do this and the blogger is openly told when this is done.

Pingbacks are also a great way of notifying another blogger of something. It’s like you’re tagging them so for those who take part in awards and tags this is great also if you’re working in some kind of collaboration with one or more other bloggers.

Now you know – the mystery of pingbacks solved. Try it and let me know how you get on.

Planet Simon