Quite often WordPress trackbacks and pingbacks can sound too confusing and complicated to even be bothered with. However, you would be surprised how simple they really are to use. The great thing with WordPress is that the system itself does the work for you.

The idea of trackbacks and pingbacks are to let other sites know you referenced a post of theirs and to let you know when other authors have referenced your posts.

If you read someones WordPress blog and like, dislike or want to comment on their post on your own WordPress blog you would add a link in your post, to the other sites post.

What happens next is WordPress will send a note in the form of a comment letting the author know you have linked to them. A linkback is then posted in on the authors post page pointing back to your post.

You will see trackbacks that have been made to this site at the bottom of posts pages after the comments.

Example:

Site One writes a post about WordPress
Site Two also writes a post about WordPress and adds a link to the post made by Site One
Site One is then sent a trackback and notified that Site Two has referenced their post.
Site One (normally) approves the trackback and a link pointing to the post on Site Two is displayed below the post made by Site One

If all of this sounds like too much don’t worry about it, you have WordPress on your side and this is all done for you automatically if both blogs are running WordPress.

Now in the event you want to reference a post made on a site that is not run by WordPress you will want to look for the posts “trackback” url. This is normally posted at the end of a post and would look something like: http://www.stcfx.com/2008/04/06/wordpress-25-trackbacks-pingbacks/trackback/

So now when you write a post that references another post you will add the trackback url on your write a post page in the Trackbacks field.

Send trackbacks to: http://www.stcfx.com/2008/04/06/wordpress-25-trackbacks-pingbacks/trackback/

WordPress will then do its magic and send a notice to the blog post you are referencing.

If you would like to try this out on your own WordPress blog simply write a post and add a link to this post.
http://www.stcfx.com/2008/04/06/wordpress-25-trackbacks-pingbacks/

Then come back to this post and look at the trackbacks. Note: you may not see your trackback right away as I have to approve it first. Also be advised that spam will not be tolerated.

Recap

1. Trackbacks and Pingbacks are used to let a blog know you have referenced them on your blog.
2. WordPress takes care of this for you if both blogs are WordPress driven.
3. You can send trackbacks to blogs that are running WordPress by adding the trackback url on the write a post page.

Sometimes having trackbacks and comments posted together can really mess with your design. Especially now with the new WordPress 2.5 where we have Gravatar functions built in to show the comment authors avatar next to the comment they have posted. When trackbacks are posted they are showing the default Gravatar because there is no comment author. Also is can be annoying to have to scroll through a ton of trackbacks in order to read what others had to say about the post.

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