How Do I Get a Pingback Notification?

When someone links the permalink from an article you wrote (example: http://www.pamelamkramer.com/get-pingbacknotification), your site will go and look at the site sending the ping, it grabs a snippet, and uses that as the comment text. These pingback notifications will show within your comment system normally notifying the author or webmaster.

***Important Tip***

If you are going to link to another author online please don’t link to just their home page! (example: http://www.pamelamkramer.com)

Link your anchor text to an About Page, Contact Page or an article they have written.

Kristin Barclay author of InDeepH2O sent me this question about pingback notifications. We would all like to know if someone is referencing our articles.

One of the first things that I asked Kristin to do was to look in her WordPress dashboard in the “Incoming Links” section. To the right of the section as you hover your mouse in that area, a down arrow will appear. If you click on that arrow it may say click to toggle and you should see a hyperlink to “configure.” You want to click configure.

You should be able to see “Enter the RSS feed URL here:” and inside the blank there should be a code. For Kristen her code is seen above and it looks at the blog search within Google. This particular code doesn’t work. My settings in this box looked very similar to Kristins too and also didn’t work.

After a lot of research I came across a suggested code to cut and paste within that box. To see if the code works, put in your own url (in this case indeepH2O). Can you see where you should place your url? Now you can copy and paste it into your browser.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=www.indeeph2o.com&tbm=blg&output=rss

For easier reading if you don’t like to read code you can use the code below. Do not paste this code in the incoming links box because it requires an RSS at the end of the code not atom.

Again this is easier for you and I to read – https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=www.indeeph2o.com&tbm=blg&output=atom

Once I knew that this code would work for Kristin I sent it to her and she copied and pasted it inside the box and hit submit.

Now she can see the last 10 incoming links to her website within her dashboard.

Another place to check for pingback notices is in the General Settings section under Discussion. Make sure that center box is checked that allows notifications from other blogs. If you look at your comments section you can change the options to filter pings only. That will allow you to see the entire history of pings to your blog.

Kristin’s original question stemmed from this Tweet from Rae Hoffman.

Kristin wanted to know if that reference would show up in her pingback notifications. She won’t find a pingback notification in her site’s dashboard from Twitter but she can find it in Google Analytics. Please note you must already have your site linked with Google Analytics for this to work properly.

Follow the arrows in order: Acquisition, Social, Network Referrals and in this case she would be looking at Twitter.

After she has clicked the Twitter hyperlink inside Google Analytics she would find a full list of urls that have been sending visitors to her site. As an example I used this screen shot taken from my own account for teaching purposes.

And there you have it, another problem solved. Hopefully this was easy to follow along and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

That is all for this weeks edition of Solve it Saturday. If you have any questions or suggestions that you would like to see please leave them in the comment section below. To learn more simple ways to navigate your online projects visit more of my How To Tips <