I am dam sure that most of the new Bloggers doesn’t know what are Trackbacks and Pingbacks. They see these words often in blogging but never think of it. These are very important to know as a fresh Blogger. Even these will help in Promoting your blogs. So let me take this opportunity to explain you a little bit on those. I don’t want to explain in my own words, so just presenting the modified content from WordPress itself.

Trackbacks: In a nutshell, TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To Do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.

A better explanation is this:

1. Person A writes something on their blog.
2. Person B wants to Comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog
3. Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A’s blog
4. Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B’s post

The idea here is that more people are introduced to the conversation (both Person A’s and Person B’s readers can follow links to the other’s post).

Pingbacks: Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with Trackbacks.

For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log. Kathleen reads Yvonne’s article and comments about it, linking back to Yvonne’s original post. Using pingback, Kathleen’s software can automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and Yvonne’s software can then include this information on her site.

The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:

1. Person A posts something on his blog.
2. Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
3. Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post.

Trackbacks Vs Pingbacks:

There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.

1. Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).
2. Pingbacks support auto-discovery where the software automatically finds out the links in a post, and automatically tries to pingback those URLs, while trackbacks must be done manually by entering the trackback URL that the trackback should be sent to.
3. Pingbacks do not send any content.

More about this or Anything about WordPress can be found at Glossary

Do you know these words before coming here?