What Alternatives are there to Pingbacks?

Updated April 21, 2020

If you’d like to disable pingbacks, or XML-RPC completely, you’ll be stopping the automatic notification to other sites when you link to them in your WordPress blog posts.

The act of notifying site owners that you’ve linked their way is an important thing that lets site owners track their popularity and content uptake.  So how do you notify site owners without doing it using automated tools like pingbacks?

Method #1 – Call Them

Have you ever even considered calling up someone, out of the blue, to thank them for their valuable contribution, discuss their post and how it influenced you to write yours?  Probably not.

Before you discount this as crazy, go back and think about it.  You can exert more influence in one call than a dozen emails (or more).  You’re 10x more likely to be mentioned by them and 100x more likely to be linked, followed and liked by them later.

Method #2 – Email Them

Much easier and less costly than a telephone call, using email is a great way of breaking the ice, letting them know you like what they’ve written and explain that you’re publishing something that links to their content.  Also, it’s easier to submit using a web form on their site than to try and locate a phone number, which sometimes are scarce on websites.

This approach is actually much more widely used in blogger outreach, where you contact someone before publishing the link and get their buy in, approval, and hopefully a mention.  There are dozens of tools on the market for conducting outreach email campaigns, many of which provide for follow-ups as well. In fact, top tools will help you identify influencers on given topics so that you can approach those who have large social audiences, large website traffic, or a combination of the two.

Method #3 – Socially Mention Them

Like, thumbs up, follow, message and otherwise reach out to them via their social networks.  Besides being regularly monitored by many, and easy to contact via social channels, you’re likely to be seen in discussions with them by their audience.  It’s a great way to get added visibility – and when they respond, it’s like an endorsement, particularly if they’re thankful.

Conclusion

In conclusion, pingbacks aren’t for everyone, or even every business. If you’ve tried before using pingbacks and failed, try one of these alternative solutions!

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