The Type Of Gas You Use Really Does Matter

In the blogging world we often hear the words “pingback” and “trackback”. We
vaguely understand them both to mean linking to someone else’s content, but
what’s the difference between them?

The short version is that
trackbacks
are the old, manual way of doing this while
pingbacks
are the more modern and automatic way. To use a trackback one generally had
to:

1. Get the trackback URL for the other person’s content

2. Put that URL into your blogging software’s editing interface

3. Write an excerpt for what you said about their content

Pingbacks are much easier. All you have to do with a pingback is:

1. Links to someone else’s content

That’s pretty much it since pingbacks are enabled (both incoming and
outgoing) by default on most major blogging engines. Here are a few other
differences:

• Trackbacks contain more content, i.e. the excerpt, where pingbacks just
  have the source and destination links

• Pingbacks are less prone to spam than trackbacks, as incoming software
  checks to see if the source link actually exists before it allows it to
  be posted

• Pingbacks use
  XML-RPC
  while trackbacks use a standard HTTP POST

So that’s about it: pinbacks are essentially the newer and less
time-consuming way of doing trackbacks. For more information on the
subtleties of blog linking technologies check out
the Wikipedia article on linkbacks.: