Trackbacks and pingbacks were developed early on in the history of blogging as ways to notify us when certain things happen. These great legacy tools are still available in WordPress. Is this something you need to know about? I would definitely say that both trackbacks and pingbacks play an important part in any WordPress blog.
Our goal today is to explain what trackbacks and pingbacks are in WordPress and why you may or may not need them. As an example, my friend Bob wrote a blog post about how much he loves cake. I also want to write about this and include something he said.
So I do and I mention his post. I copy his trackback URI or something similar in my own blog post. Now my friend Bob should be notified about the trackback so he can check it out and see what I had to say about cakes.
Pingbacks are very similar to trackbacks, but also have a few differences. You write an article, and include a link to another website. Many spammers were able to easily overcome the protections put into place. That resulted in a lot of fake and malicious pingbacks. Again, this means that sites with this feature enabled generally have to spend a lot of time moderating the resulting comments. If you link to another post or page on your own site, the pingback feature will send a notification as though you were linking to an external source.
At the end of the day, using WordPress pingbacks and trackbacks tends to result in a lot of spam and wasted time. Even if they can provide a few benefits, there are better ways to drive traffic to your site. In addition, very few people actually use these technologies in a legitimate way at this point.
Fortunately, disabling both on your own site is a simple matter. This will prevent your site from creating and receiving pingbacks and trackbacks. As a result, you should have an easier time keeping your comments section under control. Ultimately, the downsides of both outweigh the potential for a slight boost to traffic and visibility. Keeping WordPress pingbacks and trackbacks active on your site is likely to result in a lot of spam coming from people who just want to get a link of any sort posted on your content.
The good news is that you can quickly disable both options in your WordPress Settings screen. Or start the conversation in our Facebook group for WordPress professionals. Find answers, share tips, and get help from other WordPress experts. Looking for some free blog sites to help you start sharing your writing with the world?
So you want to create a WordPress blog… Congratulations! WordPress is an excellent solution for how to start a blog, plus we think blogs are super awesome! People love to share ideas, give shape to their thoughts, and maybe even reach a global audience. Trackbacks send more content, like the excerpt mentioned. That means that if you link to one of your own blog posts, from one of your own blog posts, you get an internal Pingback. Given that internal linking is an important part of SEO , this can get very disruptive for no tangible benefit.
Moderating Trackbacks and Pingbacks through WordPress by default is very easy. All you need to do is go to the comment moderation section of your dashboard. This is where you will discover that, for the most part, the majority of your Trackbacks and Pingbacks will be spam.
Why is this? So when a spammer links to your site in a footer or a thin blog post, the Pingback suddenly creates a link to their spam site. Even if your site is legitimate, this will drag it down while temporarily benefitting the spammer. You will also receive Pingbacks from sites that use WordPress to copy your content. Trackbacks are a little less spammy in an automatic sense, because the spammer has to actually implement one to get it into the system.
In the comments moderation menu, you will see all of your pending Trackbacks and Pingbacks, as well as all of the existing, published Trackbacks and Pingbacks. From there, you can decide to remove, approve, or mark as spam any you choose.
If you would prefer to disable them entirely, all you need to do is go to the Settings menu and click Discussion. This will, however, only disable those actions for future posts. For existing posts, you will need to do something else, with a little more code and effort involved. You will find this through your web host. Once you find the database, you will need to execute this query.
Make sure it is typed exactly:. This will go through the database and identify all posts that are either the Post or the Page type, and are published. On all of these posts, it will change the Pingback status to closed.
In that case, you can install this plugin , which automatically filters self pings without disabling the rest of the Pingback functionality. There are a few good reasons you might want to keep Trackbacks and Pingbacks enabled , though I will say this up front; never, ever make them auto-approve.
Not to mention the fact that those links might earn you a bit of a Google penalty in the process. So how can these be good for you? The first is, obviously, when they work as intended. Some high profile sites will use WordPress, including most top-end industry blogs. Of course, very rarely will they be working as intended. When someone steals your content and saves your links, internal links will generate a Pingback automatically.
You can also use this to discover newcomers in your niche who are linking to your content , which can be beneficial to you. Making every incoming link — from a WordPress blog, at least — a reciprocal link can do quite a bit of damage to your site. Knowledge is power. Think about it; if you have 10, Pingbacks to go through, and 9, of them are spam, is that 1 remaining legitimate Pingback worth the digging? Most people would just say no. Trackbacks are user-initiated and one-way. However, this does mean you might end up having to monitor twice as many comment threads and answer the same question several times.
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