What, Why and How-To’s of Trackbacks and Pingbacks in WordPress

Do you wish to understand what really trackbacks and pingbacks are and also how this two features can be use effectively in WordPress.

What is a TrackBacks?

A trackback is a notification that WordPress sends to an external site when you link to it in your content. Let’s say that you’ve just published a new blog post on dog training tips, which includes a link to another website that contains some solid advice for your readers.

Here is how trackbacks work in WordPress.:

• Go to the post on the other person’s blog and look for the ‘Trackback URI’ or similar.
• Once you have that link you need to copy the URL of the link.

• In Firefox, Right-click on the link and Copy Link Location.
• In Internet Explorer, Right-click on the link and Copy Shortcut.
• Back on your blog, scroll down from the editor to the Trackbacks module and paste the URL into that box. If the blog where it was copied from is a WordPress blog, the URL will end with /trackback/.
• Publish your post and the trackback will be sent. Please note that your trackback might be sent but the receiving site may choose not to display it.

What is a Pingbacks?

A pingback is a special, WordPress-exclusive comment that’s created when you link to another blog post, as long as the other blog is set to accept pingbacks. Similar to comments, pingbacks are a way in which one blogger can link his or her blog to another blog.

Here is how pingbacks work in WordPress.:

• Person A posts something on his blog.
• Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
• Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.
• To create a pingback, just link to another blog post. If that post has pingbacks enabled, the blog owner will see a pingback appear in their comments section that they can approve.

What is the similarities between Trackbacks and Pingbacks?

They both do the same thing which means they have the same functionality, nothing different.

What is the difference between Trackbacks and Pingbacks?

The main differences is that the trackbacks are manual whereas pingbacks are automatic, also pingbacks do not send any content while trackbacks are accompanied by an excerpt of the content.

How to Moderate Pingbacks and Trackbacks in WordPress?

The moderation is fairly simple. Both trackbacks and pingbacks show up under the comment moderation area. From here, you can approve, delete, or mark them as spam.

From our experience, 90 PERCENT of all trackbacks and pingbacks are spam. This is the easiest way for spammers to get a backlink from your site.

Often we see pingbacks from content scrappers who copy our entire articles word-by-word including all the links.

Due to those links, their blogging software automatically send pingbacks to our articles.

In short, we have found 90 PRECENT of all trackbacks/pingbacks to be spam. This is the reason why we have disabled them entirely. It is not worth the time to moderate a ton of spam.

How to Disable Trackbacks and Pingbacks in WordPress

If you are tired of getting spammy trackbacks and pingbacks, then there is an option for you to disable them entirely.

Simply go to the Settings » Discussion page and uncheck “Allow link notifications from other blogs” option.

Unchecking that box will only disable trackbacks and pingbacks for future posts.

If you are tired of your blog self-pinging itself, then you can simply install and activate the No Self Pings plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, the plugin will disable self pings on your WordPress site.

That’s all, we hope this article helped you in solving issues on pingback, trackback in WordPress.

But If you have issues on this, you can use our comment session or join our delegate on Facebook to solve any issues related to WordPress and subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials.