Comments » Pings

Contents

• Can I stop self-pings?
• How do I send out update pings?

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• Trackbacks

A ping (or pingback) is an automatic comment sent from your blog post, to another blog post you have linked to:

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

• Person A posts something on his blog.
• 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.
• 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.

See a more complete explanation.

Pinging a post on another blog from your post is very easy. All you do is link to it. For example here’s how a pingback appears on our own WordPress.com blog post about Twitter:

If you want to notify the other post author, but don’t want to link to him, you can add a trackback instead.

Can I stop self-pings?

Yes.

Self-pings are found useful by some, annoying by others. Those who find them useful feel that if someone finds the old post that they will see the link to the new post. But some still disagree.

For example, to link to the following post http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/twitter-widget/ you would normally use the entire URL as the link. That will cause the self ping. If you shorten the link to make it relative then the link will work but no ping is sent.

So that long absolute URL should be linked as /2009/03/26/twitter-widget/

Note: The visual editor may add the domain information back into the link. You can write out your post and before publishing, switch to the HTML editor, remove the first part (ex. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/) of the link, and then Publish.

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How do I send out update pings?

Many services like Technorati, Feedster, Icerocket, Google Blog Search, and many others want a “ping” from you to know you’ve updated so they can index your content. In most blog software and blogging services you have to manually go to different websites to send let them know you’ve updated.

WordPress.com handles it all for you. When you post we send a ping to Ping-o-Matic! – which automatically distributes it out to 15+ different services.

Last modified: May 9, 2009