Is it possible for those lifeless, body-less, AI-less things to communicate? Of course! And as it shows it may be beneficial for your blog!
The magic words are: blog pinging. The technology created to make avaliable crosslinking between blogs following same topic or simply for giving credit to an author of interesting and/or cited by you post.
Here’s how it works:
1. I write a post which you like on my blog.
2. You write a post on your blog about same/similar topic and mention my post (giving link to it).
3. Right after you post your new entry in your blog, your blog software checks each outgoing link.
4. If the link is to another blog (my blog in this case) the software looks up the html code if it contains a special tag, which points to a pinging script on my blog, it looks more-less like this:
< link rel="pingback" href="http://DOMAIN-SUBFOLDER/PINGSCRIPT.php" />
5. Then your blog sends a ping to my blog with a short notice of the related entry on another (your) blog. (It contains urls of my post and your post).
6. My blog receives this ping. First it checks if the post on my blog really exists.
7. If yes, then it checks the referral post url (your entry).
8. If incoming link is also from a blog, then my blog grabs some small summary and link to your posts and puts it in comments under my original post.
As you see this makes cross-linking almost automated and really useful. In building authority, relatedness and SEO of each blog.
Requirements
Yes, your blog/server needs to have this feature enabled. To see the geek description of this check this page.
If you want to check if your blog has this feature enabled the easiest way I think is just to view any of your pages source code and look for element < link rel="pingback"... />. If it’s there (it should be in the
In addition, if you are registered in Technocrati, it is good to know they also use pinging feature to update their info about your blog. It works similarly, only yo need to set up your blog software auto notification settings to ping Technocrati when you post a blog. Technocrati has a detailed instructions hot to set your platform to do that (look in Tools -> Pinging). If you’re using them to promote your blog it is worth adding this feature.
And finally there is also a ‘thing’ called Trackback. It is very similar to ping back but it is not automated. It does not require you to post any link in your blog as well. You just go to the blog you cited (or is related to what you have written) and ‘leave a trackback’ there (look for this feature next to ‘leave a comment’ link). This way you give the author of the other blog notice about your blog, then if he likes he can add info about your site to his blog.
I hope this puts some light on this features which I think are cool and make our Internet life better 😉