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How to Disable Trackbacks and Pings on Existing WordPress Posts

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Do you want to disable trackbacks and pings on your existing WordPress posts?

Trackbacks and pingbacks notify you that another blog has linked to your content and vice versa. However, spammers often abuse this feature by sending trackbacks and pings from spam websites.

In this article, we will show you how to disable trackbacks and pingbacks on your existing WordPress posts.

How to Disable Trackbacks and Pings on Existing WordPress Posts

Why Disable Trackbacks and Pings in WordPress?

In the early days of blogging, trackbacks and pingbacks allowed blogs to notify each other about links.

Let’s imagine you write an article and link to a post on your friend’s blog. Your blog will automatically send a ping to that person’s blog.

This pingback will appear in their blog’s comment moderation queue with a link to your website. However, spammers can also use this feature to send fake trackbacks and pings, which can hurt your SEO.

Even if you are using Akismet, some of these trackbacks may still get into your WordPress moderation queue.

You can disable the trackbacks and pingbacks feature by going to Settings » Discussion in the WordPress dashboard. Then, just uncheck the box next to ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts’.

Disabling trackbacks and pingbacks in WordPress

Keep in mind that this setting only disables trackbacks and pingbacks for any new articles you publish. All your old posts will still have trackbacks and pingbacks enabled.

With that in mind, let’s see how you can easily disable trackbacks and pingbacks on existing WordPress posts.

Disable Trackbacks and Pings for WordPress Posts

The easiest way to disable trackbacks and pings across your entire WordPress website is by using the bulk edit feature.

First, you will need to change the pagination settings so that all your posts appear on the same screen. To do this, go to Posts » All Posts and then click on the Screen Options button in the top right corner of the screen.

Disabling pings and trackpacks on existing WordPress posts

By default, WordPress shows 20 posts per page.

To change this, simply type a new number into the ‘Number of items per page’ box. Since you want to update all your WordPress blogs, we recommend typing in a high number, such as 999.

Blocking trackpacks and pingbacks on old WordPress blog posts

After that, click on the ‘Apply’ button to reload the post list.

Now, you can select all the posts by checking the box next to ‘Title’.

Select all posts on the page

After that, open the dropdown that shows ‘Bulk Actions’ by default and select ‘Edit’.

Then, just click ‘Apply.’

Bulk edit all selected posts

WordPress will now show the bulk edit settings for all these posts.

Simply open the ‘Pings’ dropdown menu and select ‘Do not allow’.

Do not allow pings

Finally, just click on the ‘Update’ button to save your changes and disable pings and trackbacks in WordPress.

If you have more than 999 posts on your WordPress blog, then you will need to visit the next page and repeat the process.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily disable trackbacks and pings on existing WordPress posts. You may also want to see our list of the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools or our guide on how to increase your blog traffic.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

48 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

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  2. Oni says

    Hello,

    maybe i do not understand fully so please sorry this question:
    1) disabling pingback and trackback from wordpress do not preserve me from someone to write them back: is it so? If yes, if someone write something that cite me i will never see (not saying that this is a problem, i’m just trying to understand).

    2) Comment in approval usually are not shown in pages(is this true?): how does the comments approval queue affect SEO of a website?

    • WPBeginner Support says

      Someone would still be able to write about and link to your site with trackbacks and pings disabled on the site you can normally use analytics tools to check for sites that are linking to your site without needing to use trackbacks and pingbacks.

      Comments waiting for comment approval would not affect your site’s SEO and would not show up on the page until you approve the comment.

      Admin

  3. lin says

    This did not work. It is still showing on my existing blog posts at the bottom.
    I have it updated in settings and “PINGS” are turned off on all posts as well

    • WPBeginner Support says

      Turning them off would disable them from being added, you would need to remove previous pings for what it sounds like you’re waning.

      Admin

  4. Zack says

    Thank you for this great and detailed guide it saved me alot of stress because I was getting alot of pingbacks with this guide I was able to get it fixed.

  5. Patrick Kamau says

    Thank you so much for this article. I have been stressed by these pingbacks for quite a while. I had turned off them from new articles but they kept coming. Now I know it was because of the old posts. I have followed your essay steps and now I hope they will be gone forever.

    Thanks.

  6. Steve says

    I’m not sure you indicated it, but if a trackback is found in a post (or page) using your Edit method (which will now be changed to be disallowed), will it alter the date currently shown for the post (or page)? I would not want the original post date to now suddenly indicate the date I ran this Edit as this would mess up the time order of the posts.

    • WPBeginner Support says

      Changing the trackback through the method in the article shouldn’t affect the published date for the post.

      Admin

  7. katie says

    Hi! Is there a way to allow pingbacks but not to show them in the comments? Or does that defeat the purpose of allowing them in the first place. Sorry if that’s a silly question, new to all of this. Thanks!

    • WPBeginner Support says

      To do that you would need to delete the pingbacks in your comments at which point we feel it would be better to prevent them altogether.

      Admin

  8. Stephanie says

    I did the steps correctly but when I go back to make sure everything is saved. The “ping” section does not stay on do not allow. It goes back to how it used to be. Why?

  9. Timur says

    Hi, how can I turn on pings on older articles?
    I have a lot of articles and mention that i disable “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article” and now i want this ping to my article. I turned on this option but mine nothing has changed with old posts.

    Regards/

    • WPBeginner Support says

      You would need to use the second method in the article to enable pings on the older posts

      Admin

  10. Babak Fakhamzadeh says

    I’ve got a few thousand posts. If I set my pagesize to over 30 or so, WordPress returns a ‘page not found’ after submitting the bulk edit and waiting for a while.

    I really don’t want to do this 100 times with a page size of 20.

    So, is there a plugin or other method that can help me do this?

  11. Jean LeFebvre says

    Thank you, I followed your advice. I have worked so hard to get rid of spam in my life and I almost let it back in again because of not knowing what it was!

  12. Wayne Shufelt says

    Just wanted to say thanks for this tutorial. I got a trackback on one of me website posts the other day and was not sure about what it was. I thought it might be something I should not open so I deleted it.

    I have now followed youtr instructions and shut of that capability in WordPress.

    So, Thanks again,

    Wayne

  13. Brown Smith says

    Hi, If I off trackback then will stop SEO juice pass? I’m really worried about my blog i just off it after read this post.

  14. JD Lasica says

    Would be nice to know what version of WordPress this works on. I’ll upgrade because I’m not seeing the Bulk Edit option. Thanks!

  15. Tony Wang says

    Great article, but disabling pings on pages in bulk edit does not seem to work, there is no “ping” option. Is that true, or am I missing something? So now I need to turn off pings on every individual existing page? Just started getting a bunch of ping spam.

  16. john says

    Thanks for the explanation. Mine were already disabled as it was configured by someone else / or switched off as a default. This article explains why they are switched off. What is also useful is to know how to do a bulk edit, i’ve not used this feature before as luckily my set up was done correctly in the first place and is a modern wordpress website with up-to-date security and secure plugins and a secure server configuration that also helps. But you can never be too sure and it is worth taking this measure of disabling pingbacks etc…You should however keep your sitemaps up to date and submit them to include new articles. This is the modern method for updating search engines. Other bloggers find out about the external links to their sites and visa versa using tools such as the google webmaster tools.

  17. Ricardo Ribeiro says

    Unfortunately on the last step of this tutorial I get

    Request-URI Too Large
    The requested URL’s length exceeds the capacity limit for this server.

  18. priya says

    All your article I read so far seems for self hosted site. Please help me find some useful articles for my wordpress blog site.

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