“WordPress Pingbacks Take on a New Lease of Life”
Are you getting the most out of your pingbacks for your SEO? If you use WordPress you may want to know whether they are really working for you and if not, why not. Especially since there’s something very easy you can do about it…
Brisbane, QLD, Australia 04/28/11 – Since the introduction of pingbacks into WordPress as a development of trackbacks, WordPress bloggers have had a simple and powerful way of exchanging incoming links with other bloggers. This not only helps with search engine rankings but provides readers a great way of travelling an author-driven network of relevent information. Well, that’s what it’s supposed to do, but does it work? And if not, why not?
Just include a link in your blog post’s content and WordPress will attempt to ping it automatically, right? Well, yes and no… According to recent tests, up to 50% of your pingbacks might not be working, and worse, the WordPress platform doesn’t tell you why. They just simply don’t appear in your trackback list. Can you say ‘frustrating’?
Unknown to many WordPress users, attempted pingbacks actually do return a ‘pingback fault code’ for failed pingbacks, it just never gets displayed. There can be a number of reasons why pingbacks don’t work… perhaps you are linking to the blog’s homepage instead of a pingable post, perhaps the blog isn’t pingback-enabled though it seems to be, perhaps you have a temporary connectivity problem and just need to try again… but it would be nice to know these things so you can do something about it.
There’s just some times when automation is put in place a little too soon, and a manual facility would do better. For this reason, there is a new free plugin for WordPress that let’s you ping resources manually and see the results: get Pingchecker here.
This plugin also includes an instant workaround for the most commonly experienced error (that you’ve probably never heard of, because again, WordPress never tells you about it!) where due to a bug in the server code the blog server you ping can’t find your link to them on your blog page, and so doesn’t accept the pingback. Depending on your template this can account for up to 25% of failed pingbacks!
For all these reasons, Pingchecker greatly improves your chances of a successful ping, and that in itself makes this a worthy addition for your blog plugin arsenal, and a veritable necessity for anyone wanting to use pingbacks to increase their search engine rankings. And the best part is it’s completely free: get Pingchecker here.
