The Power of Pingbacks – How To Properly TAG Someone

Is this considered a how-to guide? Yes? No? Maybe? 😀

I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO CALL THIS!!! This is basically just a quick post to teach you the proper ways of tagging someone!

Or as I’d like to call it – the power of pingbacks.

Sounds fancy, right? 😛

This issue has been on my mind a lot lately! I’ve been tagged for multiple different tags and awards now, especially in the past few weeks, but I’ve only ever received like 5 pingbacks (out of like 30 tags)!

I think some people might not know about the art of pingbacks lol so I am here to explain it to you!

(By the way, this is for WordPress users! I don’t know if it’s the same for users of other websites!)

What you should know beforehand is that when you want to tag someone in your blog post (for an award or a fun tag etc), only putting in someone’s blog URL is not enough!!!

But before I get into how to properly tag someone, here’s a little explanation of what a pingback actually is:

What are Pingbacks?

“Pingbacks are methods for alerting blogs that you have linked to them. A pingback is a special type of comment that’s created when you link to another blog post, as long as the other blog is set to accept pingbacks.”

You might have seen one of these in your own or someone else’s comments section:

that thing at the bottom is a PINGBACK

Enabling Pingbacks

You can enable pingbacks by going to your Settings –> Discussion –> Default article settings and then click “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles”.

You can also enable/disable pingbacks on individual posts via the Discussion module on your Add New or Edit Post page:

The Art of Properly Tagging someone

Now, let’s get into how to PROPERLY TAG SOMEONE IN YOUR POST! 😀

As I said before, simply linking to someone’s blog URL is not enough for someone to be notified that you’ve tagged them!

If you tag someone because of an award, a tag or whatever and you want to make sure that they actually SEE it, they need to be notified. And that notification is called a pingback!

How To Create A Pingback

To create a pingback, just link to another WordPress blog post! This is the important bit… you need to link to a blog POST! Not the simple blog URL!

So, if you were to tag me in one of your posts, do not use https://toomuchofabooknerd.wordpress.com but rather click on a blog post and copy that URL! It really doesn’t matter which post it is! I always use the latest post 🙂

The link will then look something like this: blogURL.com/2017/05/17/favorite-summer-reads/. All you gotta do then is insert the link in your post the way you usually would! 😀

WordPress automatically notifies you when someone linked to your post aka pingback-ed (is that even a word lol) to you! These pingbacks then appear in your notifications section! And you always have to approve a pingback which is great because that way you won’t ever miss when you were tagged in something! 🙂

You might have tagged some people for an award and they never got back to you because they did not get a notification for it! And I hope you now know that they weren’t being rude, they just genuinely did not know you tagged them! 😀

So, unless you have used the link to someone’s blog post to tag them, the person you tagged in the ‘Whatever’ Blogger Award or in a super fun tag might never notice it!

No one can be on WordPress and always check out EVERYONE’s posts every single day. And I certainly don’t have the time (or motivation) to go back like 3 days in my Reader and check everyone’s tags/awards to see if I was tagged!

Quick summary:

• go to Blogger A’s profile
• click on one of their blog posts
• copy the link of said blog post
• insert the link the way you usually would in your own post
• Blogger A will automatically get a pingback notification and see that you tagged them!

That’s it!

Please make sure to ALWAYS use a link to someone’s blog post to tag them!

What you can do as well is link to someone’s ABOUT page but that is only possible if they have enabled pingbacks for that page! (Unlike me, who complained about not getting pingbacks when I didn’t even have them enabled for my About page :P)

So check their about page to see if they’ve received pingbacks before! If yes, GREAT, link to that page! If not, use a link to a blog post!

I hope this whole thing was somewhat understandable! If you have any questions left, feel free to leave them in the comments! 😀

Thanks for reading and HAPPY TAGGING! 😀

Quotes and pictures are taken from this WordPress article!