Social Media Training Tip
What Are Pingbacks And How They Can Be Important For Your Blog Many people have seen the word “pingback” before but are unfamiliar with what it is. Almost everyone who has a WordPress blog will recognize the word from the checkbox underneath new posts asking whether or not to allow them on your blog. In this Social Media Training tip, we’ll let you know what a pingback is and why it is important to your small business’s blog. What Are Pingbacks? In a nutshell, a pingback is a comment that tells the reader that another website has linked this article on their webpage. For example, if you write a blog sharing a delicious family recipe, someone that owns a cooking blog that reads your post might link to it on their blog. In your pending comments section, you will be able to see this pingback and the blog that it is coming from. If you approve the pingback, it will show up in your comments section that the cooking blog posted a link to this blog post, along with a link to that cooking blog’s post. How Pingbacks Can Be Helpful To You Perhaps the most obvious way that pingbacks help you is via SEO (search engine optimization). Links connecting your website to other legitimate websites (and vice versa) help improve your search engine ranking. Another way that pingbacks can be helpful to your website and small business is through networking with other blogs. Following the example above, if a cooking blog liked and shared this recipe that you posted, chances are they may like and share other recipes in the future. Now that you know this cooking blogs URL, you could visit it and get in touch with the owner as well, maybe setting up a link sharing system in the process. This can also work the other way as well. If you see a blog that relates to your small business that features pingbacks, you might consider mentioning a post of theirs on your website so a pingback link to you appears on their page. They might even return the favor and link to you in a future post! Pingbacks can be great for both building up SEO with linkbacks and for networking with other blogs. As long as you monitor your pingbacks to make sure they are coming from legitimate blogs (and not spam sites), there is no downside to allowing them in your comment section!