Need Help Understanding Trackback & Pingback

I've been using 3.0.0 for about 2 weeks now. Since I'm not a blogger, I've tried to immerse myself in understanding the concept and the actual usage of trackbacks & pingbacks.

I think I've got a solid grasp on the concept. It's just a way of automatically notifying someone that you're talking about their website. The main benefits from a usability standpoint are:
1) owner of the site I'm talking about is notified that I'm talking about them
2) visitors to the site I'm talking about is notified that I'm talking about that site

My hope is that the site owner or their visitors will visit & join my forum.

The SEO benefits are that I'll get a link from the site in question without traditional link campaign methods. Pingbacks should create reciprocal links and trackbacks create 1 way inbound links.

My Problem
I created my own WordPress blog to test this stuff. But I've not really figured out the right way to link to blogs from my forum to get trackbacks/pingbacks.

Some blogs seem to have the same url for permalink and for viewing their post. Some blogs have a trackback url that appends /trackback/ to the end of the page's url but redirects to the page url without the /trackback/ appended. So what do I link to in order for a trackback/pingback to show up?

I've been able to get some pingbacks & trackbacks to work but it seems like it's hit or miss on what generates a link. I was unable to get a test thread to get a pingback link from my test blog even though I edited the pingback link several times to try different urls & formats.

I realize that some blogs moderate comments/trackbacks but some obviously don't.

So what's the answer? Do you always use the url which is listed as the "trackback url" or the permalink? Do you link to the url which that url redirects to? Do you link to the url that displays the page in question? Are there commonly known exceptions on what you link to and when?

Or is it really just hit or miss on whether this stuff works?

Thanks, Ross

Hello Ross,

you should use direct link to the post (permalink) for pingbacks:
rmjvol » Blog Archive » NHL Info
(this should be included in the forum message posted)

and special trackback link for trackbacks:
rmjvol » Blog Archive » NHL Info
(this should be specified in "trackback URLs" input field when new thread is created)

And make sure that ping/trackbacks are enabled at your blog.

OK, your trackback went thru.

I dug into my WordPress dashboard & found that the Askimet plugin (comes turned on by default) had marked my trackback as spam. There's an option to mark that it made a false positive on the trackback & let it thru, which I did. Supposedly, Askimet will learn from the false positive and get better.

I read up on Askimet and see that most people who've mentioned it think it's perfect but a few people have real problems with false positives.

Anybody got some insight into Askimet?

Why would it mark my trackback as spam but Oleg's came thru just fine?

Ross