Simple Ways to Stop WordPress Trackback and Pingback Spam

Trackbacks and Pingbacks are an excellent way to tell that someone has linked to your blog within their own page or blog post. It is a good technique for enabling trackback and pingback function – as it keeps a close eye on who is linking to your site.  It cross-checks the links and the chunk of contents, along with title from your comment section.

Although it is a handy method, sometimes it becomes annoying for website owners. Most of the spammers to perform illegal or immoral activities using Trackbacks and Pingbacks. In order to block such spams, you need to take some serious measures that can help you enhance the security of your WordPress site with ease.

In this blog post, we will introduce some ways to stop WordPress trackback and pingback spam. But before this, let’s understand how spam comes from.

How Does Trackback and Pingback Spam Happens?

Most of the trackback and pingback spam come from some special robots or scripts. These can send tons of trackbacks and pingbacks to multiple sites automatically with an aim to take you to some illegal pages for hackings, scams or any other malicious attacks.

In fact, most of the people send the spam manually in order to achieve their marketing goals for their site or web contents.

Ways to Stop Trackback Spam and Pingback Spam:

1. Disable Trackback and Pingback Feature Fully

If all the trackbacks and pingbacks received on your site are spam, then you can turn off “trackback and pingback” function completely on your WordPress site. This will disallow any link notifications from other websites.

For this, you just need to login to your WordPress admin panel > click on the Discuss button under the Settings > find the “Default Article Settings” area > uncheck the “Allow link notifications from other blogs (trackbacks and pingbacks)” to disable this feature. This will block all the trackback and pingback spam on your upcoming blogging posts. But for the existing ones, you have to delete them manually.

You can either delete them one by one from your site or  use a SQL query.  For the second method, you need to first log into your Cpanel and then enter the phpMyAdmin. Here, you will see a SQL tab, just click on it and submit the following SQL query to disallow trackback and pingback features of WordPress.

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ‘closed’ WHERE post_status =’publish’ AND post_type = ‘post’;

2. Use WordPress Plugins to Stop Trackbacks and Pingbacks Spam

WordPress offers a couple of powerful plugins that can help you block trackbacks and pingbacks spam from your website. Antispam for all fields is a robust plugin that helps you reject spam from your website. It checks all the trackbacks and pingbacks for a valid IP address, and helps you protect your site from spammers.

WP-SpamShield Anti-Spam also removes trackback spam from your WordPress site, without hindering  the trackbacks and pingbacks. It basically performs as a firewall that can protect your site from spamming links that are either submitted by bots or humans.

Akismet is also an incredible plugin that can strengthen the security of your WordPress site. It checks your comments against the Akismet Web Service to determine whether they look like spam or not. Once checked, it allows you to review the spam found under the “Comments” section of your blog.

Conclusion

These are some of the best tips that can help you protect your WordPress site from trackbacks and pingbacks spam. You can either change the settings manually or install the WordPress plugin to remove the WP trackback and pingback spam.