Blogging: What’s the Difference Between Pingbacks and Trackbacks?

In the blogging world we often hear the words “pingback” and “trackback”. We vaguely understand them both to mean linking to someone else’s content, but what’s the difference between them?

The short version is that trackbacks are the old, manual way of doing this while pingbacks are the more modern and automatic way. To use a trackback one generally had to:

1. Get the trackback URL for the other person’s content

2. Put that URL into your blogging software’s editing interface

3. Write an excerpt for what you said about their content

Pingbacks are much easier. All you have to do with a pingback is:

1. Links to someone else’s content

That’s pretty much it since pingbacks are enabled (both incoming and outgoing) by default on most major blogging engines. Here are a few other differences:

• Trackbacks contain more content, i.e. the excerpt, where pingbacks just have the source and destination links

• Pingbacks are less prone to spam than trackbacks, as incoming software checks to see if the source link actually exists before it allows it to be posted

• Pingbacks use XML-RPC while trackbacks use a standard HTTP POST

So that’s about it: pinbacks are essentially the newer and less time-consuming way of doing trackbacks. For more information on the subtleties of blog linking technologies check out the Wikipedia article on linkbacks.:

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