A trackback on your WordPress website or any other blogging medium that you might be using is an automated notification (trackback) of another blog that has linked to one of your blog posts. Trackbacks are a way to notify other bloggers that you have mentioned them in your content and these are usually displayed in the comment section of your blog.
Unfortunately, like most things in the internet marketing world that can be of value, there are others that can easily abuse this method as a sneaky way to get links from your website to their own sites. Trackback spam is a sneaky way for those under the table black hat doers to create backlinks for their website to their sites. This is a black hat method and there are a couple of ways you can use to guard your website from this spam.
Controlling trackback spam
How are you going to control trackback spam on your WordPress site? There’s a couple of ways you can control trackbacks on your WordPress sites – turning trackbacks off, or filtering the trackbacks, and keep them out.
Turn trackbacks off: This is the easiest method where you can disable the trackbacks feature on your WordPress site. Another easy method to turn them off is by deleting “wp-trackback.php” from the root of your installation directory. Once deleted, you can re install the file if you want to enable them again.
Filter trackbacks: To filter trackbacks on your WordPress site you can use a few plugins that were designed to filter trackbacks.
- Akismet is one of the default plugins that you get when you install WordPress. Activate the plugin and create an account on Akismet to filter out trackback and comment spam. This is a free service for personal websites, but a small charge may apply for commercial websites.
- Simple Trackback validation is a plugin that can run a series of test on any trackbacks you receive. This is another great plugin you can use for those unwanted trackback spam links.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks