What Is Wordpress Pingback, Are Pingbacks Good For Seo

What is WordPress Pingback? Are Pingbacks Good for SEO?

Akarshit MahajanLast Seen: Mar 3, 2024 @ 8:44pm 20MarUTC
Akarshit Mahajan
@AkarshitMahajan6300

16th October 2023 | 67 Views
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What is WordPress Pingback? Are Pingbacks Good for SEO? Should you enable Pingbacks in WordPress? We all answer this today.

Modern Internet requires connectivity. Pingback is a WordPress feature that increases Connectivity, boosts engagements and at the same time helps in SEO.

You will get a complete breakdown of what exactly are pingbacks and important information about the same too.

WordPress Pingbacks

So, What is WordPress Pingback? Pingbacks are WordPress comments are comments created on another site, containing a link of the post, whenever your post links to them. 

For easier understanding consider 2 sites, Site A and Site B. Site A is writing a post, and likes the information given on Site B. So Site A adds a link to the particular post of Site B in their content. The code in WordPress sends a ping (notification) to Site B, on the lines of “Hey, Site A added a link to your site in their post, wanna reciprocate?” and Site B think’s it’s good, so WordPress creates a comment in that particular post on Site B called “Pingback” which contains the link to the incoming URL from Site A.

What Is WordPress Pingback, And How To Use It

What Is WordPress Pingback, And How To Use It

Now you know what is WordPress Pingback. Let’s discuss how to ensure you can get Pingbacks to work properly.

Before answering “are the Pingbacks good for SEO?”, we need to explain what is WordPress Pingback and what are necessary conditions for WordPress Pingbacks to work. Many new website owners complain of WordPress Pingbacks not working.

Pingbacks are essential, but for Pingbacks to work there are some necessary conditions. Many people complain of Pingbacks not working. Here are the necessary conditions for Pingbacks and Trackballs to work:

  • Your post should be published.
  • Your site and the site to which you are linking both should be using WordPress
  • Both sites should have Pingbacks and Trackballs turned on
  • Pingback should not have been manually removed by the other site
  • Your site must have sent the ping (The ping is not sent immediately after saving the post)

You cannot do anything if another site isn’t using WordPress, but if another site is using WordPress then both of you should have Pingbacks and Trackballs turned on. You cannot control the other site, but you can do your part by turning it on for your site.

Sometimes Pingbacks are just blocked due to misconfiguration in your web hosting that blocks XMLRPC requests.

You should contact your hosting provider for it.

In case you are looking for good reliable hosting, then Bluehost and Siteground are 2 of the most reliable names in the world of Hostings.

You should read about Siteground Sucks Why I Shifted from Siteground to Bluehost in 2021

Below is a link to get the best discounts on Bluehost Hosting.

Are WordPress Pingbacks Free Backlinks?

Nope, WordPress Pingbacks in comments are labeled ‘nofollow’, meaning that they are not treated as real backlinks and can majorly help in referral traffic and indexing performance along with the obvious SEO benefits from inter-linking, but they will never be treated as Backlinks.

How to turn on/off Pingbacks and Trackball

Turning on/off Pingbacks for your site is fairly simple.

The question of whether you should turn them on or not will be discussed later.

WARNING: We can set a default setting for the entire site using the below method. However, WordPress allows you to toggle Comments and Pingbacks for Individual posts too. The settings done in your post can override your sitewide settings.

  1. Log in to WordPress wp-admin.
  2. From the dashboard, go to Settings, and then click Discussion.
  3. In the Default article settings:
    • If you want to enable pingbacks and trackbacks, select the Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) check box.
    • If you want to disable pingbacks and trackbacks, clear the Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) check box.
  4. Click Save Changes.
How To Use Pingbacks And Trackballs In WordPress

How To Use Pingbacks And Trackballs In WordPress

How to Ensure that your Ping is not manually removed

Well, pings are usually removed if the site pinging is not reliable, or the content is irrelevant. For example, if you are writing a post about “How to tie a Tie” and put a link for another WordPress site’s post titled “Learn How to Drive a car”, then these both posts are quite irrelevant.

And the other site may think it’s irrelevant and spam, so it may remove it.

Though removing a ping is a personal preference of other site, and you cannot challenge their decision.

You should try to put links for relevant posts only. If your post is about “How to tie a Tie” then a link to another site with the post “How to tie your shoelace” might be relevant and therefore will have fewer chances of Being removed

How to manually send a WordPress Pingback to another WordPress site

Sometimes it may just happen that your site didn’t just send the ping, therefore no comment was created on the other site. This can be problematic.

There are 2 basic solutions for this problem.

First Solution is to edit your post, save it as a draft, and then set the status to publish again. In most cases, the pings are sent within 10 seconds of doing this.

The second solution requires a bit of Programming Knowledge

WordPress has a function that manually sends a pingback to posts. Here is the code that you can put in any file xyz.php in your root directory (directory having wp-config.php) and then load that file.

 -1, 'post_type'=> array('post','download' )));
foreach ( $Creations as $Creation) { 
    $content = $Creation->post_content;
    $content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
    pingback($content, $Creation->ID);
}
?>

After saving this code just visit, youtsitename.com/xyz.php and wait for it to execute. It is recommended to delete the file after execution, in case of timeout refresh the page.

Are Pingbacks Good for SEO?

Now we know what Pingbacks are, and how to use them, but there is a much more difficult question to answer.

You know what is Pingback and must be waiting to know Are Pingbacks Good for SEO?

The answer is Yes and No.

Pingbacks are essentially cross-linking between 2 sites.

Links are good for SEO. That is usually true. Links will give you SEO Advantage, would make your site get indexed more frequently, and increase referral traffic from the other site too.

Therefore they are advantageous for SEO.

But think for a second, other sites will also send you pingbacks, that will show as comments on your site. These comments will take users to other sites. Also, excessive low-quality external links on your site can harm your rankings.

Therefore it is important to ensure that Pingbacks that appear as comments on your site are relevant and high quality. Else you can face more loss than profits.

Secondly, the current state of Pingbacks that appear in comments is such that it only shows the title of the post with not much information with it. 

For Google and most of the other users, it would be way too little to justify clicking the link.

Are WordPress Pingbacks bad for Performance?

WordPress Pingbacks can harm performance, sometimes the impact is very-very big on cheap shared hostings.

WordPress Pingbacks require your server to scan through every word of your post every time there is a change in the post.

Then it sends requests to all sites that are linked in your post.

Besides that WordPress also needs to listen to calls for other sites that are trying to send a request to link to you.

This costs computational power.

Most decent web hostings from reliable providers will work well. I have had it work fine with a site getting 2000 views a month on GoDaddy cheapest Shared Hosting, depends on the use case.

You should give it a try for a week or 10 days, and then measure the loading times compared to when you had it turned off, if the difference is significant you should turn it off.

If you are very concerned about the website’s performance then you should definitely check out 17 Secrets to How I Optimize My WordPress Site To Load In 927 ms (100% GTMetrix)

Should you enable Pingbacks in WordPress?

So now you know What is #WordPress Pingback and are WordPress Pingbacks Good for SEO?

So should you use them?

They allow you to tap into interlinking about 40% of the internet.

WordPress #Pingbacks are handy and a WordPress exclusive feature that allows you to interlink between your site and any other WordPress site. Considering around 40% of the Internet uses WordPress, you have got for yourself a huge target audience that can very well leverage the WordPress pingbacks.

I shall say any site with less than 100,000 views a month that relies on SEO should use WordPress Pingbacks given that their Web Hosting can comfortably run it.

Always remember that the Website’s performance aka the loading time is a more important metric for performance compared to External Links.

So if your #Website feels slow, or sees a significant drop on Google PSI/GTMetrix scores then you should avoid Pingbacks.

Besides that, if you like #SEO, then Pingbacks are a really handy and easy way to generate Internal Links and boost Referal Traffic.

I hope you liked reading it, In case you wanna send this page a pingback that would be loved too. 🙂 

Jokes apart, if you have any doubts or suggestions I would love to hear from you in the Comment Section below.

Akarshit MahajanLast Seen: Mar 3, 2024 @ 8:44pm 20MarUTC

Akarshit Mahajan

@AkarshitMahajan6300

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Followers269


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