Help needed with "Pinging" and "trackbacks"

[frugalwench]

O.K., maybe I'm just dense, but I truly do not understand how to do this. I just got through reading a blog where this guru told you to go to this one site, bookmark your site under every category, and then ping it from there. How do you do that?

And what exactly is a trackback? I see the thing on the bottom of the posts that says to send trackbacks, but who do I send them to? Do I send them to my site URL, to every single page in my site URL, to what?

Please help! My income is in the toilet since I took my most popular pages off of Hubpages, and I can't get a page rank from Google, and I'm desperate!

TIA

[Linda Buquet]

Paragraph 1 doesn't make sense to me and sounds spammy or blackhat maybe. You'd never want to bookmark in every cat, only ones that really apply. Not sure how you'd ping from that site cuz don't know what it is.

The only time you use a trackback is on your own blog if you reference someone else's blog post. When you link to their post and then add the trackback URL to the trackback section in Wordpress, it lets them know you quoted or mentioned their post and normally adds YOUR link to their comments section. Sometimes people have to approve trackbacks to be sure it's not trackback spam, so you don't always get the linkback to your blog instantly.

So it's like carrying on a conversation in a way. Every time I link to someone's blog post on my blog or even here at the forum I do a trackback. Then the readers of that blog post will see a link in the comments back here and know we started a conversation about it over here and may follow the link to us.

From the horses mouth - Wordpress:

"Trackback helps you to notify another author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog, even if you don't have an explicit link to his article. This improves the chances of the other author sitting up and noticing that you gave him credit for something, or that you improved upon something he wrote, or something similar. With pingback and trackback, blogs are interconnected. Think of them as the equivalents of acknowledgements and references at the end of an academic paper, or a chapter in a textbook."

[frugalwench]

Thanks, Linda. That site, OnlyWire: The Only BookMarklet You'll Ever Need!, is a site that sends your site to several bookmarking sites at once. I think what he was saying was to sign up for all the bookmark sites listed, then when you have something new on your site, you can go and bookmark it to all those sites at once. It just saves a lot of time, so you don't have to go to each place individually, or have all those buttons on your toolbar. It's not "black hat", exactly, just a traffic building tool, and thinking back, he did say to only subscribe to the ones that are applicable. Some of them are strictly news sites, so I didn't subscribe to them, because I dont' do news.

[Linda Buquet]

Oh ya OnlyWire is fine. When you said every category and ping from there it implied something else to me. FYI that's not pinging as in ping your blog. It's different. But now I see what you are talking about.

[frugalwench]

So the link in my sig here must do a trackback, because every message I put on here shows as a trackback to my site.