Someone posts in their blog and links to my site. I get an automated pingback 'comment' in WordPress. What's the motivation to accept that comment? If I accept that comment, it becomes a reciprocal link, which is devalued by the SEs, right? If I reject the comment, I now have a one-way inbound link, which is good, right? Am I missing something?
I reject all pingbacks. It's spam in most of the cases and I don't like them anyway. How are pingbacks any useful for my visitors? They are not.
I don't normally look at the SEO values, rather at the content and relevancy of the comments. You are right in the sense that 99.9% are spams. Only the rare one out of a million is approved by me.
Well, a pingback has no content value for anyone. I'm not sure why pingbacks even exist. I'm sure the spammers invented them as a method to drive traffic and index spammy sites.
I used pings and trackbacks to build early PR on one of my sites, and I had good experiences with it as a method of building conversations and debates with other webmasters. I haven't used it much recently but I think it can be a good way to network with other bloggers and get some deep links...Of course most of the incoming ones are spam but there are some good ones, too. A good pingback will challenge your post, or add details to it, or basically take the conversation to the next step. You can go back and forth generating a lot of good unique content and backlinks that way...
I always thought they were sort of pointless / spammy. This threads actually pushed me to remove pingbacks from all my sites though.
Can some one help me out here, what is the difference between PingBacks and Trackbacks? I've never been able to get my head around this one.
If they come from quality blogs then I accept them. These are nofollow anyway so you don't have to worry about linking to shitty resources anyway.
To continue with the questions here... I recently got my site up and running (it is part blog, part information pages) using WordPress and then had it submitted to lots of directories to get the ball rolling. Now, I just started receiving what looks like "automatic" pingbacks from some site every time I post something (and I try to post daily if I can...need to work on consistency more). These pingbacks have an IP address (which I cannot follow the link for) and SEEM to say that the post/pingback originated from my own ABOUT page! Is this just someone "spamming" my blog, or is there a real reason why this would show up this way? I have consulted the WordPress docs on this and I am still a bit confused. I THOUGHT that a true pingback would give me an actual link to the other person's site...as in to the article that they want to reference on their blog. Is this just pingback spam? I have read the posts here as I have been trying to decide whether or not to allow pingbacks...and I am thinking about manually just declining all garbage like this (but I want to make certain it IS garbage before I do). Thanks!