Pingback and Trackback Issue: How to disable Pingback And Trackback on WordPress

There are obvious reasons why Pingback and Trackback issue may turn headache for you. If you’re agonized with this menace; then you are in the right place. We’ve assembled a number of solutions to disable Pingback and Trackback for you that must give you complete rid of these comment hazards.

Before you proceed to Solutions, read about the Pingback and Trackback Problem with a detective look. This is a five-minute study that will help you understand the solutions with no efforts (Pingback and Trackback: Comment Communication between blogs)

Now let’s enter the focus point directly. Our full presentation will cover up the following topics regarding disable Pingback and Trackback—

Simple understanding of Pingback and Trackback

As we simplified everything on Pingback and Trackback in another post (Link above), we won’t go details.

Easily speaking, both Pingback and Trackback are methods of communication between blogs via Comment.

Blog A creates an outbound link in his post whose destination is another post of Blog B. Blog B gets a Comment in the Comment section awaiting for moderation that looks like “Pingback on (Blog B’s Post Title). If Blog B approve the comment, this will be displayed in the comment section with a link to Blog A’s post. This is called Pingback.

The purpose of Pingback and Trackback is the same but there are obvious differences in the mechanism of these two.

In Trackback, Blog A sends a notification to Blog B’s Comment page that awaits for moderation. The differences are that Blog A did not create link from inside the post but from ‘Send Trackback’ box located below Post Editor. Moreover, the Trackback comment appeared in Blog B’s comment page with A’s post excerpt.

For both Pingback and Trackback, it is necessary that both the blogs have their Pingback and Trackback feature enabled in Setting.

In honest sense, if communication occurs between the blog of same Interest or Niche, Both the sides get backlink from each other and thus supposed to get benefited. But reality says otherwise.

Why to disable Pingback and Trackback comment

In early days of Blogging, Bloggers used Pingback and Trackback as instrument to communicate with the blogs of same category by creating backlink. There was nothing wrong. These mechanism help them expand their blogs.

But with the passes of time, These techniques are frequently being misused and presently have become the medium of Comment Spamming. To achieve thousands of backlinks overnight, spammers are always active to misuse these tools to rank their sites higher in Search Engine. You may also be victim of such hundreds of spam Pingbacks with invalid emails at the initial stage of your site.

In this backdrop, disabling Pingback and Trackback in their sites is the perfect and secure solution to the committed bloggers.

What is Self-ping?

When you create internal link between your own blog posts, it also generates Pingback comment as if it came from other sites. This is called Self-ping. Self-ping is also a disturbance that is produced unknowingly for nothing. So it must be disabled.

How to disable Self-ping with and without plugins

If you like to use plugin to disable Self-ping, you can use No Self Pings plugin. Moreover, Disabler plugin can provide you option to disable Self ping. But I think it is unnecessary to use plugin as there are strong features available with WordPress Admin Dashboard to drive Self-ping away. So we won’t go presenting plugin story to expands post body for nothing.
However we can disable self-ping two ways without help of plugin.

If you want to stop Self-ping being generated from individual link, you can do that by editing your link URL structure. Usually your link URL structure goes as follows—

https://www.netplanter.com/how-to-build-up-own-iis-ftp-server-with-windows-7

This happens when you create link by using Insert/Edit Link option in Post Editor. Go in Text Mode of Post Editor. You see that the link within <a> …..</a> tag looks as follows—

<a href="http://www.netplanter.com/how-to-build-up-own-iis-ftp-server-with-windows-7/"> ......</a>

This link will certainly create Self-ping problem. To solve this problem, you need to shorten the URL by cutting out the Home page portion (http://www.netplanter.com) and write the following way.

<a href="/how-to-build-up-own-iis-ftp-server-with-windows-7/"> .....</a>

Now no Self-ping will be generated for that link. Test yourself!

This is the solution for individual link. Editing each Link URL is certainly annoying and time-consuming. However, you can stop Self-ping from WordPress Setting option which will remove Self-ping from your entire WordPress site.

Here is the process—

This change will totally disable Self-ping from your site.

Disable Pingback and Trackback for new posts

Now comes the question of disabling all Pingback and Trackback that enter yours from other sites. You can do it easily from WordPress Setting. For this—

This change will totally disable Pingback and Trackback from others’ sites.

But they will be disabled for your new posts only. Then what about your old or existing posts where Pingback is always active.

For existing posts, you have to follow another tactic. Follow next step.

How to disable Pingback and Trackback for existing posts

We’ll use Bulk Post Editor to disable Pingback for existing posts. You can use this feature to edit Post-related factors like changing Author name, Category, Post status, Post format, Comment permission etc.

By clicking Screen Option on upper-right, we can determine what will display in this page and how.

From this editor, we can also set whether we want to allow or disallow Pingback. Just follow the following steps—

That’s all of our exposure on how to disable Pingback and Trakback. Hope this article eliminated all of your question regarding the issue. If so, share this with fellow WordPressers. And if you have any bitter experience on Pingback or Trackback, please share with our readers by commenting.