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Disable Trackbacks
Description:
When it comes to spam and pingbacks/trackbacks, the vast majority by far is via trackbacks rather than pingbacks. Very, very few people use trackbacks for legitimate uses anymore (I’ve gotten less than 5 in the last 8 months) as WordPress, etc. all use pingbacks now as their primary ping method.
I had already installed Cookies For Comments which successfully stops most spam comments but I still had to deal with the tons of trackback spam. So, I wrote this plugin.
It will disable new trackbacks across your site, both legitimate and spam. However since very few people use trackbacks legitimately, this combined with Cookies For Comments should cut your spam down to next to zero.
Why should I use this plugin over one of those trackback validator plugins?
Most non-Akismet style anti-trackback spam plugins work by connecting to the URL that sent the trackback and looking for a link to your blog. The problem with this is that many spammers actually post links to your blog in their spam posts rendering those types of plugins useless. Even those that check the IP address to make sure it matches are beaten by spam blogs (aka splogs).
In the end it’s up to you what to use for anti-spam, but I personally use Cookies For Comments, this plugin, and then Akismet to catch anything that makes it through.
Download:
- Download from WordPress.org (1,332 downloads)

about 1 year ago
It disables trackback leaving pingbacks?
about 1 year ago
Alessandro Ronchi on November 5th, 2008 at 12:51 PM2008-11-05T20:51:14ZF jS, Y \a\t g:i A wrote:
Correct.
about 5 months ago
If we disable trackbacks, is there any impact on SEO?
about 4 months ago
I still use trackbacks and have great success with them, they are great for legitimate genuine webmasters who understand the reasons for linking to other sites, even your competition. Totally backwards from what marketers from the mid to late 90’s learned about linking to or even mentioning competition on our sales page. But there in lies the difference, all we had back then were sales pages, no content, no free information, nothing but pitch. Nowadays its quite a different story, web 2.0 demands we flip everything we know about linking upside down and do the exact opposite of what we learned starting out. To this day it is weird to me to link to competitors or people I overlap with considerably. But I do willingly and with 99% glee, because it brings 35% of my first time visitors back to my site according to my stats.
about 4 months ago
In Reply To Jessia Bannister:
That’s what pingbacks are for. Trackbacks are a dead protocol in my opinion.
about 3 months ago
hey, I thought of using this plugin, SO I felt I should thank you before using.
Thanks!!! you people at Automattic make web world more user friendly for dummies