Visitors can easily respond to posts on a WordPress website. One can even respond to pages. Comments on pages are often disabled. In quick edit you can choose for allow comment.

Using WordPress Comment Settings you can specify how WordPress handles comments.

In this training we take a close look at those options.

You can find the Comment Settings via WordPress >> Settings >> Discussions
We start at the top and work out the possibilities one by one.

Discussion Settings

Default article settings

• Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article
  

If this option is checked and you link in a message on your blog to an article on another blog, then your WordPress installation will ping the other blog about it.

• Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles
  

With this you indicate that you want to include any pingbacks and trackbacks under the post, in the comments.

But what is the difference between a pingback and a trackback?

If your blog sends a signal to another site because you link to an external article, then that is a pingback. A pingback is, therefore, outgoing traffic.

When another site pings your WordPress site, that is the first step towards a trackback. It becomes a trackback if you also allow this message.
A trackback is therefore a confirmation of an incoming link that you have approved.

Link Spam
When approving inbound links, make sure that the 'sender' is reliable.
For spammers, trackbacks play an important role in their search engine marketing.
Trackbacks are a form of link building. The more links to a website, the higher the authority of that site.

You probably do not want search engines to combine your site with spammers.

But rest assured, it does not matter who links to your site. After all, you have no control over that.

You do have control over trackbacks.
As long as you do not allow an inbound link, there is in fact no question of a trackback to the other site. These settings can be overwritten per post.

You can set this when creating or editing a post via the Screen options, as shown in this image.

You can find the Screen options in the upper right corner above every post in edit mode.

Note: When you allow trackbacks, a piece of your text will be displayed on the other website, and even your Gravatar next to it, so be sure you want to be connected with that particular website.