Are you bothered by the pingbacks and trackbacks some spam sites post on one of your blog entries? It’s good as far as they are not being posted by spam sites and is a legitimate way to quote mentions of your post by other sources. However now-a-days it’s mostly the spam sites trying to steal your visitors by posting pingbacks and trackbacks. Here are two things you need to do to disable trackbacks and pingbacks on your wordpress blog.

1. Disable pingbacks and trackbacks for new posts:

   In your wordpress Admin panel go to Settings > Discussions and uncheck the box for “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)”. This will make sure that all newer posts have the pingbacks and trackbacks disabled. Remember this is only for the posts that you’ll publish going forward. The next step disables them for the past posts.

2. Use SQL to close the pingbacks and trackbacks:

   If you are just starting out you can skip this step. All your wordpress data resides in a database. You’ll need to open the database using phpMyAdmin etc. (refere to your webhosting documentation) and run the following SQL query —

   UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status='closed' WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'post';
   UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status='closed' WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'page';

   The first one disables them for all published posts and the second one disables them for all pages.

To disable or enable pingbacks for specific pages or posts, go to the post editor and under the post check or uncheck the box for “Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this page” under Discussion.

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