Are Trackbaks and Pingbacks Still Useful?

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.

Michelle asks:

Should I approve trackbacks and pingbacks? Do allowing trackbacks and pingbacks help SEO or add value to my blog/website?

Trackbacks and pingbacks were very popular some years ago, but lately fewer and fewer blogs are using them, so I suspect some of our readers don’t even know what those terms mean. They are pretty much interchangeable, and refer to a network ping that your blogging platform (e.g., WordPress or Blogger) will send to other blogs whenever you link to them. Once the other blog receives the ping it will create a link to your post on the comment section (or on a special “Trackbaks” section).

The purpose of having trackbacks and pingbacks is to foster conversations among bloggers. By inter-linking the posts that are referencing each other it becomes easier to follow the different opinions and takes on specific issues.

Initially it worked fine, and I had listed trackbacks on this blog for a long time. A couple of years ago, however, content scrapers and spammers discovered that trackbacks could be used to build backlinks. That is, they would write a post linking to hundreds of other posts around the blogosphere, and would receive a backlink from the trackback generated on each of those blogs (most links were nofollowed, but this didn’t seem to act as a deterrent).

The result was a lot of spam coming via trackbacks, and moderating it became a pain. That is why I decided to remove them from all my blogs, and most people did the same. You can still find some sites with trackbaks (sometimes called “Who’s linking here”), but they are definitely the minority.

Answering the original question now: I think having trackbacks and pingbacks does add value to your visitors, but most of that value is lost if most of your trackbacks are coming from spam and scraper sites. Given that this is probably what’s going to happen today, I would simply turn them off.