Have you been receiving those annoying Wordpress spam comments on your blog posts?

I'm speaking specifically about those that are called Pingbacks and Trackbacks

I have and i can tell you they are a real annoyance. Can you imagine having to deal with hundreds of these things mixed in with your legitimate blog comments?

You have to go in and manually delete the things from your blog comments, and that's why they are so annoying. But just what is a Pingback in Wordpress?

What are Pingbacks and Trackbacks?

Trackbacks and Pingbacks refer to two methods that are used to alert blogs that another blog has linked to them. This used to be very good tools because they served to notify a website about new content that might be of interest to the website's users. They were also great for creating backlinks to your website.

The problem with them these days is that they are now widely being used as a tool to spam Wordpress websites. The spammer sends out a huge amount of these Trackbacks and Pingbacks with the aim of getting their links onto as many websites as possible.

The difference between a Trackback and a Pingback is that one has to be sent manually and includes an excerpt of the content, while the other one is sent automatically and without any content.

Here's a little bit more on both.

Pingbacks

Pingbacks are a type of comment that gets created when you link to another blog post. For it to be sent both blogs have to have Pingbacks enabled. Because of this, they can be considered as a form of remote comment.

For a person to automatically create and send a pingback all they have to do is just link to the blog post they want to send the pingback to. If that post has pingbacks enabled then the new pingback will appear in the comments section of the linked blog.

Trackbacks

As mentioned earlier, a trackback is not sent automatically. Trackbacks are notifications that Wordpress can send to an external site when you link to it in the content of your blog post. Let's say you write a particularly interesting post and include a link to another website that has some related content that would be of interest to your readers.

You could send a trackback to the site to get the owners' attention. When he sees it he could then choose to approve the trackback, and what this would do is cause an excerpt of the post you wrote and a link back to your site to appear in that website's comments section.

Hit Next Page below to move on to page 2 - "How to stop Pingbacks on Wordpress existing posts"