Is using Pingbacks for link building a good idea?

Personally, I really like “pingbacks” as a link building strategy, simply because done properly it genuinely adds value to your own blog and other people’s blogs and it isn’t a spam technique.

I did touch on this topic a while ago in my “link to others to get traffic” blog but I’d like to expand on it a bit as I’ve learnt a lot more about it recently.

I suppose we should first define what “pingbacks” are so that we understand how they work and what the benefit is.

Pingbacks (or Trackbacks) are simply links which occur automatically when one blog post links to another, usually in the form of a citation or reference. It’s a great way to inter-link related content. Note that you will need a blog platform to take advantage of pingbacks.

To give you an example, in a blog post I made some time ago, I referenced another blog by linking to their post. I use Blogger.com (not for much longer mind you, WordPress here we come!) and Blogger supports Pingbacks, which means that we automatically received a link back from the other blog. See below.

Also, pingbacks are much friendlier than posting comment spam on other people’s blogs to get either traffic or SEO benefits. From an SEO perspective, pingbacks are really a form of reciprocal linking, but if you’re smart about it, you can get quite good benefits.

So here’s my three step guide to using pingbacks to get traffic, links and PageRank (AKA, “authority”) for SEO.

Step 1

Make sure your blog platform supports pingbacks.

Step 2

Make sure the blog post you link also supports pingbacks. That’s also kinda critical!

Step 3

Once you’ve written a blog post, search for other blogs which are relevant and accept pingbacks. You can do this manually by going to Google and typing “blog pingback (your blog post topic/theme)”. This way you can find blogs which are talking about your topic and copy and paste their links into your own blog post.

They are notified that you’ve linked to them and they will automatically link back to you. If their post is old and has some PageRank, your post will inherit some authority quite quickly and have more chance of ranking highly for your chosen blog topic.

You can use Google’s “Show Options” feature in the search results to filter and search for older blog posts which may give you some additional authority.

I rarely do this, but a quick plug for the oddly named, but I have to say, rather impressive Market Samurai software which does all this hard work on this front for you. You can see their video explaining pingbacks for SEO here. Quite interesting….

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Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.