What Is a Pingback in WordPress: Boosting Your SEO in 2022

Pingbacks are an excellent WordPress feature that helps individual bloggers boost each other’s visibility and SEO effectiveness. 

But what is a pingback in WordPress exactly, and how does it help you get more traffic?

Keep on reading as we answer this and other questions below!

What is a WordPress Pingback?

In essence, a ‘pingback’ is a type of comment exclusive to WordPress that notifies other bloggers when you include a link to their content in your article, as long as both blogs enable the pingback feature.

The pingback will then appear as a comment on the page to which you are linking with or without an excerpt from your content, depending on the other blog’s theme settings.

Creating WordPress Pingbacks

Unlike trackbacks, which must be set up manually, pingbacks are automatically posted.

You only have to include a clickable link to another WordPress blog post or page in your own content. If the other blog has turned on this feature, the pingback will be automatically posted and mixed in with other comments in the comment section of the target page.

Note: Your pingbacks will vary in style on blogs with different themes.

How to Disable a Pingback in WordPress

In some instances, bloggers might want to disable the pingback feature. For example, if you fall victim to a WordPress pingback attack where you receive too many pings in a short period of time, you can avoid these spamming sites by following a few steps:

1. Navigate to the ‘Discussion’ tab under ‘Settings’;
2. Uncheck the ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs’ toggle;
3. To disable pingbacks on a single post, open its ‘Discussion’ settings, and untick the ‘Allow Pingbacks & Trackbacks’ box;

Note: Even if you disable pingbacks, other bloggers can still link to your articles.

You can also turn off self-pings (when linking to your own posts) by removing the ‘domain’ name from the URL and leaving the ‘slug’. This type of interlinking only works within the same site. When linking on different domains, use the full link.

The Difference Between Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Trackbacks and pingbacks in WordPress serve the same goal: to inform blog owners that other sites have linked to their content. 

However, as the legacy version, trackbacks have to be approved manually by the blogs to which you link. On the other hand, pingbacks are newer and automated, meaning they are instantly reviewed and posted without user input.

Bloggers allow pingbacks & trackbacks for a variety of reasons, but they also come with certain cons, as listed below:

So, should you disable WordPress pingbacks? If you are growing a budding site, pingbacks and trackbacks can do a lot for you in terms of increasing your domain’s visibility

However, if you’ve already made a name for yourself, then your site might become the target of promoters looking to spam you for backlinks. In such cases, consider turning off this feature to avoid the trouble of sifting through countless useless pings for a few legitimate ones.

Bottom Line

Hopefully, now you have your answer of what is a pingback in WordPress and how it can help you boost your SEO. Ultimately, you should consider the needs of your blog or site and weigh the pros of cons of using pingbacks to see if they might be helpful in your circumstances.