Say I have a blog, and SFP forum that I would like to promote a little more.

I make a few posts but the search engine indexing is a bit slow.

I reference posts and pages on other people’s blogs and invite them to come discuss the topics with me.

The Pingback / TrackBack specifications suggest that such a post in my forum SHOULD be able to send a simple ping or a trackback to any url appearing in a post.

for instance, I mention Bob’s post on widget development in my technical forum or reference his page concerning a wordpress plugin that I really like, when I include a link to the subject I’m speaking about, The Forum finds the url in the post and when I publish or edit the post, the forum sends a ping or trackback to the referenced page.

it really doesn’t matter if the ping or trackback is accepted or not, just that the attempt to notify the remote web page that a link was mentioned should be enough.

Akismit and other tools do a wonderful job at filtering spam pings and trackbacks from blogs, but if the reference is a good reference, or there is relevant content in my forums, reputations and discussions can quickly build.

On this issue, I reference two very good sources and implementations of the pingback/trackback specifications.

The specs are here: http://www.hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback

Usable tools to help implement the function are here: 

http://phptrackback.sourceforge.net/docs/

http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/cgi/pingback-proxy/

as an example, use the second link here to test the ping function on forum posts that already have links to your own site in them. You will better understand.