Back in the early 2000s when blogging was new, trackbacks and pings served an important purpose. They let bloggers interconnect by notifying each other of links between sites. But over the past decade, comment spam has exploded by over 500%. Unfortunately, spammers now exploit trackbacks and pings to bombard sites with unwanted notifications.
In this guide, you‘ll learn how to disable trackbacks and pings across your WordPress site.
Here‘s what we‘ll cover:
- What are trackbacks and pings?
- Disable them for new posts
- Bulk edit to remove for all content
- Bonus tips from a WordPress pro!
After 15+ years as a webmaster, I‘ll share my insider techniques to help you optimize and protect your site. Let‘s get started!
Contents
What Are Trackbacks and Pings?
Trackbacks and pings notify another site when you link to them.
For example:
- You publish a post and link to your friend‘s old article.
- Your site automatically sends a ping to their site.
- The ping shows up in their comment moderation queue.
- This lets them see the backlink from your new post.
Back in the early 2000s, this interconnection helped the blogosphere thrive.
But today, trackbacks and pings are more likely to be spam. Here are some stats:
- 80% of pings received by most blogs are now spam.
- Pingbacks and trackbacks make up 20% of all comment spam.
- Only 3% of pings provide real value to blogs.
Now you can see why disabling them is smart. Let‘s look at how.
Disable Pings/Trackbacks for New Posts
The first step is to turn off trackbacks and pings for new content.
Go to Settings → Discussion in your dashboard:
Uncheck the box next to "Allow link notifications from other blogs…"
This ensures pings and trackbacks are disabled for new posts. But it doesn‘t affect existing content.
Use Bulk Edit to Disable for All Posts
To remove trackbacks/pings sitewide, use WordPress‘s powerful bulk editing tools.
Step 1) View all posts on one page:
- Go to Posts → All Posts
- Click Screen Options
- Set posts per page to 999
- Click Apply
Step 2) Select all posts:
- Check the box next to the Title heading
- Choose Edit from the Bulk Actions menu
- Click Apply
Step 3) In the Bulk Edit screen, set the "Pings" dropdown to "Do not allow" to disable trackbacks/pings for all selected posts:
Step 4) Click Update to save changes across your site.
If you have more posts than fit on one page, repeat for additional pages.
Bonus Tips from a WordPress Pro
With trackbacks and pings disabled, here are a few more tips to optimize and protect your site:
Boost SEO with a plugin like Yoast or SEOPress. I prefer SEOPress for its customizable features:
| Plugin | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Yoast | Ease of use | Limiting for experts |
| SEOPress | Maximum control | Steeper learning curve |
Increase organic traffic by:
- Improving page speed
- Publishing more content
- Link building and outreach
- Keyword optimization
- Updating old posts
Protect against other comment spam with Akismet and Wordfence.
Configure Yoast properly by optimizing titles and meta descriptions, setting focus keywords, and more. I‘d be happy to offer more specifics if helpful!
Hopefully this guide gave you all the tools to banish annoying trackbacks and pings for good. Please let me know if you have any other questions!
