Do pingbacks in Wordpress help or harm SEO? Or neither?

[jhinchcliffe]

Hey everyone,

Just wondering, do pingbacks in Wordpress help or harm SEO? Or neither?

[itrogers]

Personally, the only reason a pingback is useful for me is for the notification that someone is linking to me. When you "accept" the pingpack it displays it on the blog as if it were a comment. When you view the pingback in the comments on the post page it really doesn't make any sense at all and doesn't really have any value to the page or those looking at it. I typically just delete the pingback and go forward now knowing another site linked to me.

Also, there is the possibility that Google may crawl the link in your comments. In that case it will now look like a 2 way / reciprocal link, where there have been several cases that Google has discounted / devalued those types of links. Hope that helps.

[jhinchcliffe]

yes it does thank you!

[NakulGoyal]

I agree with Ian 100%. It does not make sense (Even though that pingback link is nofollowed). Does it help your user ? Would it be useful to have that link available to them ?  Think about the user experience and in most cases, we get the correct answer, which is almost certain to be white hat way of handling the situation :).

Great answer Ian.

[global12]

There's a few pingbacks on my blog that are broken links. How do you remove pingbacks?