If you are unsure how movabletype’s trackback feature works, I suggest you create two weblogs and practice pinging between them before you place a load of content onto your site.
In the documentation trackback and ping are synonymous (but not in all cases). When you are creating an entry ‘Allow Pings’ means create a trackback link for this entry. Then, with the default templates, you will see a trackback(0) link at the bottom of your post. Other bloggers will then notify you if the have quoted your post elsewhere and have the courtesy to do so.
There is an entry in Weblog Config | Preferences | Publicity/Remote Interfaces/Trackback to have ‘Allow Pings’ turned on by default.
If however you have posted content and not yet turned on trackback as I did when I migrated to movabletype, your only option is to turn on ‘Allow Pings’ for each individual post (137 of them in my case). Jumping into the mtentry table and setting allowpings = 1 for each entry won’t work as there has to be a matching entry in the mttrackback table as well. Changing mtentry only displays the trackback(0) link but it is empty.
