Anyone that builds a website has to understand pingbacks. You can have the best web designer/developer in the world but in 2011 this is especially true of websites that are not as viral as say failblog or iheartchaos. This is especially true of websites and blogs (such as ours) that sit in an impacted category of blogs like tech and consumer electronics. Pingbacks is an important link building strategy, simply because, if done properly, genuinely adds value to your own blog and other people’s blogs and isn’t a spam, unless you’re one of those who puts up dummy blogs just to link back.
I did touch on this topic a while ago in our 25th episode of our podcast but I’d like to expand on it a bit as I’ve learned a lot more about how Google deals with pingbacks and why this plays a vital role in the longevity of your blog/site.
Pingbacks (also known as trackbacks or backlinks) are simply links which occur automatically when one blog post links to another, usually in the form of a citation or reference or noting source material (backlinking). Sometimes its an acknowledgement to the site and its writers. Similar to a simple handshake, it’s a great way to interlink related content and it’s important to know that you will need a blog platform to that takes advantage of pingbacks. Blogger, Tumblr, LiveJournal and of course WordPress supports Pingbacks, which means that we can automatically receive a link back from the other blog if those authors do so. It’s similar to a comment but more complimentary.
A simple example is referencing another blog by linking to their post.
So can you comment on another blog to get pingbacks? Mostly no. Why not? Because most comment boxes and comment threads are boxed in with no follow href tags to avoid Google from picking up the spammy comments. This a technique known as comment spam or spamdexing where some commenters take advantage of another site’s traffic by linking back to their own site instead of commenting about article at hand.
And how does Google see this?
When Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when they rank websites in their search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted but it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
But if your post is being referenced with a link within someone’s article, it will give you that extra oomph on your page and it tells Google that you’re becoming more of an authority site – meaning that more sites are linking to you because:
- You provide something that others don’t have
- Your site or your post is just too cool
- The author likes you
- Someone likes you
