No one has been able to tell me what the purpose is behind WordPress sending pings and trackbacks to itself if you link to an article located in your archive.

It’s a great feature.

1. Google (and the other search engines) send web visitors to your old stories.
2. If you want those web visitors be become aware that new posts were published on the same topic, then you need self pings.
3. Go to that 2005 blog post, scroll down to the comments, and you’ll see a listing of fresher posts affiliated to that topic.
4. If Mike Linksvayer uses “self pings”, you should too.
5. (((Mike Linksvayer still hasn’t get around “tags”, which has a similar effect, but that’s because of a limitation of his “theme”, which is the part of the WordPress software that governs the visual layout of a blog.)))

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PS: One problem is that those self pings (along with other pingbacks and trackbacks) go into the comment feed, which some feed subscribers dislike.

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