How To Track Pingbacks To The Homepage

When another blogger links to one of your posts, you usually get an automatic notification known as a pingback. But when someone links to your homepage, there is no such notification*. This is because WordPress accepts only pingbacks sent to specific posts. Even if the person linking to you is using a publishing platform that lets them ping homepage links, your WP blog will simply ignore their pings.

* The link might still show up in the “Incoming Links” widget, but that’s only if you’re lucky.

To work around this limitation, I’ve created a plugin that enables you to track pingbacks sent to your homepage. The plugin will display these pingbacks in a new Dashboard widget name “Incoming Homepage Pingbacks”. Note that unlike with normal pingbacks, pings sent to the homepage will not show up as new comments. This is done to discourage link spamming.

Screenshots

The dashboard widget with some place-holder pingbacks

The widget configuration screen

Download

homepage-pingbacks.zip (6 KB) Requires WordPress 2.8 or higher.

Known Issues

  • This plugin only enables you to track homepage pingbacks, not send your own. The WordPress algorithm for sending pingbacks contains a hard-coded check that prevents it from sending pings to most homepage links.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 30th, 2010 at 13:59 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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