Pingback backlinks. How to use them correctly in 2021 and beyond

No matter what the SEO gurus tell you, pingbacks are relevant method of backlinking. And just like there are good backlinks and there are bad backlinks, the same is true for pingbacks.

Sites link to the other sites, because their authors consider the content of those other sites worth and would like to share them with their readers. And if you’re already referring out, why not get a link back at the same time, right? After all, the easiest way to get a backlink is to give one in advance.

Many bloggers using wordpress rely on various SEO plugins and their recommendations. I use them too. Specifically, I use probably the most popular one – Yoast SEO.

I’m not going to debate here now whether the most popular necessarily means the best. With these plugins, the one that is more user-friendly often wins, and if you get used to the environment of one pugin, you probably won’t change it for another, because you know that they all actually do the same.

Yoast SEO (and other SEO plugins) evaluate your post based on several parameters and they give you some valuable tips how to improve it. For example, they recommend that you use the keywords in the article title, meta description, and subheadings. They recommend that you link from the article to other pages on your domain (internal links) using appropriate keywords, and they also recommend that you link out to external sites that are quality, authoritative sources of information. They do so because they believe that co-citation and co-occurence are important Google ranking factors (BTW, Google has patents for them).

The theory of co-citation is quite simple. If you link to two different pages from one article, you give search engines the impression that the pages are somehow related to each other, even though they are not directly interlinked. And no one actually says that both these “related sites” must be external sites, one of them can be your own site or another site in your portfolio. Google notices such “relationships” and takes them as so-called co-cited sources.

Although WordPress is now a complex content management system (CMS) and it is modularly extensible into e-commerce sites, Internet forums, directories, and whatever, the truth is that WordPress was developed primarily as blogging software.

Therefore, Wordpres contains also a native notification feature, which allows one blog to notify the other that it has linked to it. And the second blog has the opportunity to verify the relevance of such a link and also of the content of the linking page, and repay it with a backlink using the mentioned pingback feature. The creators have a name for it and it is PINGBACK.

Now, pingbacks are nofollow by default and they are placed among the other comments below the main text of the article, right? Never mind!

We now know that Google takes these types of links as “signals” and does not ignore them. This is proved by the fact that these links appear in your Google Search Console.

Therefore, whenever you want to satisfy Yoast SEO (or another SEO plugin) that doesn’t give you a green light, until you refer to an external source, do the following:

Wikipedia and Wall Street Jornal are not the only high-quality authoritative sites you can link to. There are many other quality resources that you can link to and possibly deserve a sweet pingback link back.

You need to start with a good article. No blog will approve a pingback to an article that is an utterly colossal bullshit. So, after you have written a good article that you are happy with yourself, go to google and search:

intext:pingback keywords 2021 (or whichever year is – to elliminate old posts with potentially closed comments and pingbacks)

Let’s say I wrote a nice little article about tropical plants and I need some good pingback links to start it up. I don’t want to link to direct competition, but I don´t mind to link to a site on succulents – they are closely related but not directly competing with my topic. Thus I will make a section on succulents within the article, just a short one.

I’m looking for suitable pingback candidates on Google and here are the options.

intext:pingback succulent 2021

I will edit my section on succulents to include the information that:

• not only roses are a suitable gift for Valentine’s Day, but also succulents and will refer to article number 1.
• I will also mention that I can turn succulents into small live art at home by placing them in a suitable frame,
• or in a hand-made flowerpot and I will refer to Articles 2 and 3 respectively.

If your article is worth it, in a few days you will see those sites have approved the pingbacks and you have a good signal for Google.

Using this method, you have absolute control over the pingback link, except, of course, that the site owner may not approve the link, but that’s simply beyond our reach:

• you purposefully choose a pingback partner (quality, authoritative site with existing visitors);
• you know in advance that the partner accepts pingbacks, as he has done so in the past;
• you control a toxic neighborhood (you don’t want to be in the company of pinbacks to sites with drugs for erectile dysfunction treatment, unless you do business in this industry);
• You will receive a link directly to the inner page, with the title of the article in the anchor (you control keywords);
• You bring your site to the attention (of other websites and Google too) from the very beginning, even if you don’t want to work on an active backlink campaign (lack of money, time, whatever).

Don’t be afraid of pingbacks. Let them become an integral part of your daily content creation.