A pingback happens when another blogger writes a post and includes a link to your post in their post. When they publish their post you’ll normally receive an email notification letting you know they have referenced (i.e. linked to) your post. The email notification commonly includes an extract from the post they’ve written, a link to their post and a link to the post you had written.

Clicking on the link to their post means you can:

  1. Check out what they’ve written
  2. Leave a comment on their post (if you choose)
  3. Decide whether you want to approve, delete or spam the pingback. Mostly you approve all pingbacks unless it obviously been written by a spam blog (these you delete or spam).

Once you’ve approved the pingback it’s displayed in the comments on your post with just the extract of post showing enclosed in brackets like these [...]. This is so other readers can follow the link and read the post on the other persons blog if they are interested.

Below is what a pingback might look like in the comments of a post.

See Also: How To Link To Other Bloggers Posts