Ask Pankaj & Arnab

All About Pingbacks and Trackbacks

By Pankaj May 7, 2007 filed in Miscellaneous

Conceptually, pingbacks and trackbacks are simple but could prove to be little confusing at the start as it was the case with one of my colleague . He asked me series of questions related to trackbacks and pingbacks to get his doubts cleared. Here is the conversation which I had with him and I hope this would help you as well in case you have any doubts on this topic. His questions are in bold text.

What are trackbacks and pingbacks anyway? I know these are the methods of communicating between blogs and are used to notify the blog authors about the inclusion or reference of their article/posts by other bloggers..
As you rightly mentioned above, both of these are very similar in nature yet very differernt. Let’s see this with an example. Let’s say I have read a post on your blog and I would like to write a post on the same topic as is yours. I would like you to know that I have read your post, found it interesting and I have written about the same in my blog (for my reader of course). This is the situation where notification methods like trackback and pingback comes in picture. When I write a post on my blog, I will send a pingback/trackback notification to your blog. Your blogging software, on the receipt of my notification will display excerpt from my post along with a link back to my post as a comment in your blog post. Benifit is that readers of your blog will be able to read what I have to say about your post (by reading my comments sent as trackback/pingback) and my reader will also get to know about what I have to say about your blog. Readers of both the blogs can comment on either of the posts as they know a way to reach other’s post now by means of the link provided. So as I said, they are very similar in their purpose. As a matter of fact, pingbacks were designed to overcome some of the shortcomings in Trackback. Read More »