How to Disable WordPress Trackbacks?: A Beginner’s Guide

WordPress trackbacks are one of the most useful elements for your SEO. You can easily send trackbacks to various blogs to communicate with other websites. The trackbacks were initially introduced for blogs to notify each other about links. They are also a form of “blog conversation” that can be used between blogs. Although you will want to use trackbacks to grow the audience of your blog, it might bring a negative impact on your website through the trackback spam. So, we will show you how to disable WordPress trackbacks on your website in this tutorial. But, before that, let’s look at what are trackbacks.

What are Trackbacks in WordPress?

As mentioned earlier, trackbacks are a form of blog conversation which enables different blogs to communicate with one another. When a blogger writes an article, a trackback section can be filled up by the blogger if the article references to relevant blogs. Then, the trackback can be left on other blogs when you publish it. The trackback then appears in the comments with the title, excerpt, and a link to your blog.

The trackbacks are a great way to increase traffic by communicating with other blogs and bloggers through them. However, there is a possibility that you might tend to attract a lot of trackback spam towards your website as well. Trackbacks and pingbacks are widely used by spammers to send fake pingbacks and trackbacks to your WordPress website. Therefore, it is necessary to disable WordPress trackbacks in your website in order to keep it safe and secured. 

How to Disable WordPress Trackbacks? 

You can disable the WordPress trackbacks of your website with the help of a few simple steps. All you need to do is follow these simple steps mentioned in this tutorial and you can easily disable the WordPress trackbacks in your website. You can use Akismet but some of the trackbacks might still be on your moderation queue.

Step 1: Restrict Link Notification from Other Blogs on New Articles.

WordPress allows you to restrict link notification from other blogs on new articles. These links mostly consist of pingbacks and trackbacks.

To disable it, go to Settings>>Discussion on your dashboard. Then, uncheck the “Allow notifications from other blogs on new articles” option. This can be seen in the default article settings section.

This will only disable trackbacks on the new articles that you publish. But, all your older articles might still have trackbacks. Even WordPress can add trackbacks anywhere in the posts which you link on your own blogs. To eliminate them all, further steps can be used.

Step 2: Turn Off Pings on All Posts.

The remaining trackbacks can be eliminated or blocked by just turning off or not allowing pings on all the posts of your website. First, you need to go to the Posts>>All Posts section of your dashboard and select the Screen Options. Then, set the items per page to 999 and click on Apply as 999 is the maximum limit for the items per page. This will reload the page and show 999 posts on the same page. 

After that, select all posts by checking the Title checkbox. Then, select Edit from the Bulk Action dropdown menu and click on Apply. You will be presented with a bulk edit options. 

In the bulk edit settings, look for the pings settings. Here, select Do not allow option for the ping and click on Update.

If you have more than 999 posts for the page, repeat this process until every post of your website is edited for your website. 

Wrapping Up:

We hope that you will be able to disable WordPress trackbacks with the help of this tutorial. They are mostly disabled to stop spam on your website if you get a lot from them. You can also disable self pingbacks in WordPress and WordPress comment moderation to help with the process of reducing spam. 

If you found this article helpful, we are sure that you will find the following blogs interesting as well:

• How to add reCAPTCHA in WordPress Comments
• A Beginner’s Guide on How to Create a Multi-Page Form in WordPress
• How to Add a Preloader to WordPress Site