Comments on WordPress sites are often criticized as lacking authority, since anyone can post anything using any name they like: there’s no verification process to ensure that the person is who they claim to be. Trackbacks and Pingbacks both aim to provide some verification to blog commenting.
To enable trackbacks and pingbacks, in the Discussion Settings of your Administration Panels, select these items under ‘Default article settings’:
Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article.
Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)
Selecting one option and not the other would not be very neighborly 😉
Once enabled, trackbacks and pingbacks from other sites will appear in your Administration Panels just like other comments, but on your post pages, they will appear according to your theme’s design.
Once enabled, pingbacks are sent automatically when you publish your article, you don’t have to do anything. To send trackbacks, you will need to find the trackback URL somewhere on the post page you are linking to. If you can’t find one, try to determine if the site supports pingbacks. If it does, you should not send trackbacks as well. Copy/paste the trackback URL into the Send Trackbacksfield on your Add New Article screen. If you don’t see this field, go to the screen options and select the Send Trackbacks option. Note that selecting this does not send trackbacks, it only displays the field called Send Trackbacks. When you publish your post, trackbacks will be sent to the URLs you pasted into the field. This field will also show the status of trackbacks and pingbacks on your Edit Post screen.
If there is someone that wants to send a trackback to your WordPress blog because their blogging software does not support pingbacks, your trackback URL they should insert into their post edit panel is your blog post’s permalink with “trackback/” appended to the end. If their software supports pingbacks, they do not need to do anything, the process is automatic.
