What Is Trackback Spam & How to Stop It from Ruining Your Blog

If you‘re a blogger, you‘ve likely seen it before – a sudden influx of spammy looking comments on your posts with sketchy links to unrelated websites. Annoying at best and potentially harmful at worst, trackback spam is a serious issue that plagues many bloggers, especially those on WordPress.

As an online sales and marketing expert who has helped many bloggers clean up their sites and protect against spam, I‘ve seen firsthand how trackback spam can hurt your blog‘s credibility, user experience, and even search engine rankings if left unchecked. In this ultimate guide, I‘ll explain exactly what trackback spam is, why it‘s so problematic, and most importantly, give you concrete steps to prevent it from ruining your blog.

Understanding Trackbacks and Pingbacks

First, let‘s establish a clear definition of trackbacks and how they work in the blogging world. A trackback is essentially a notification that one blog sends to another to say, "Hey, I linked to your post in my post." In the early days of blogging, it was meant as a way to facilitate conversations and connections between blogs writing about similar topics.

Here‘s a simple example – let‘s say you write a post on your WordPress blog about the best social media scheduling tools. In your post, you include a link to a post on another blog that did a detailed review of one of the tools you mention. If you have pingbacks enabled on your blog (which is WordPress‘s automated trackback system), your blog will automatically send a pingback to the other blog to let them know you linked to them.

On the receiving end, that other blogger will receive a notification and see the pingback show up as a comment on their post, usually saying something like "Your post was mentioned on [Your Blog Name]: [Your Post Title]." They can choose to approve the pingback, which will make it visible to their readers with a link back to your post.

Behind the scenes, pingbacks work by including a special link in the HTML header of your post that looks like this:

<link rel="pingback" href="https://otherblog.com/xmlrpc.php" />

When you publish your post, WordPress automatically sends an XML-RPC request to the xmlrpc.php file on the other blog, which then creates the pingback comment.

So in an ideal blogging world, trackbacks and pingbacks would be a great way to network with other bloggers, build backlinks, and cross-promote relevant content to your audiences. But unfortunately, spammers quickly figured out how to exploit the pingback system for their own gain.

The Rise of Trackback Spam

Trackback spam, also known as pingback spam or comment spam, occurs when a spammer abuses the trackback system to get their spammy, low-quality, or completely irrelevant links onto other people‘s blogs. Instead of sending legitimate pingbacks because they actually referenced your post, spammers will program bots to automatically send pingbacks with their links to any blog they can find, regardless of relevance.

Matthew Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, noted the emergence of trackback spam as early as 2005 in a post on his personal blog:

"One unintended consequence of the popularity of pingbacks and trackbacks was a sharp increase in the amount of spam blogs would get. Spammers realized they could create a fake blog, have it send out pingbacks to other blogs, and increase visibility for their links."

And the problem has only gotten worse since then. According to data from Akismet, one of the leading anti-spam plugins for WordPress, they detected over 53 billion pieces of trackback and comment spam in 2019 alone. That equates to an average of 1.6 million spam comments per day that their plugin blocked from appearing on users‘ blogs.

So why do spammers bother with trackback spam? A few reasons:

1. It‘s an easy way to get backlinks, even if they‘re spammy and short-lived. Spammers hope that some bloggers will accidentally approve the pingbacks without looking too closely.

2. Trackback spam can be a foot in the door for more insidious malware, viruses, and scams. If a spammer can get their shady link on your blog, your readers become prime targets.

3. Some trackback spam comes from "content scraper" sites that use automated bots to steal blog posts, publish them on their own site, and blast out pingbacks to the original site in an effort to outrank them in search engines.

Ultimately though, trackback spam is just a numbers game – spammers know that if they send out enough spam pingbacks, some of them will slip through the cracks. And every spammy link that appears on a legitimate blog is a win for them.

How Trackback Spam Can Harm Your Blog

At this point, you might be thinking "Okay, spam is annoying, but is it really that big of a deal? I‘ll just delete the spam comments when I see them." But trackback spam can do real, long-term damage to your blog if you‘re not proactively preventing it:

• Spam links erode trust: If your readers see questionable links and sketchy comments on your blog, they‘ll associate your brand with low quality. They may assume you don‘t put much effort into maintaining your blog, or worse, that you‘re somehow affiliated with the spammy sites. In the eyes of your audience, your blog is only as reputable as the sites you link to.

• Spam can hurt your SEO: Search engines take spam very seriously, and your blog can be penalized for linking to spammy or low-quality sites, even if it‘s just in your comments. If Google sees a pattern of your blog linking out to "bad neighborhoods" of the web, it will assume your site is also low quality and adjust your rankings down accordingly. Blogger and SEO expert Neil Patel has warned that if more than 2% of your blog‘s outbound links are spammy, it can negatively impact your SEO.

• Malicious links put your readers at risk: Worst of all, some trackback spam can contain links to sites that distribute malware, viruses, scams, and other nefarious content. If you unwittingly approve these spam pingbacks, your readers could click the links in the comments and get their device infected or personal data stolen. Not only will this sour your audience on your blog, but it could open you up to liability issues as well.

• Managing spam wastes time: Even if you‘re diligent about moderating your comments and deleting any spam that comes through, sorting through all those pingbacks takes valuable time that you could be spending creating content, promoting your blog, and engaging with your audience. As a busy blogger, you want to minimize repetitive manual tasks as much as possible.

Clearly, taking a zero-tolerance approach to trackback spam is crucial for maintaining your blog‘s integrity, authority, and audience trust in the long run. So what‘s the best way to prevent it?

How to Prevent Trackback Spam in WordPress

WordPress bloggers have two primary options for stopping trackback spam: completely disabling the pingback and trackback functionality, or using anti-spam plugins and tools to automatically filter out spam pingbacks. Let‘s go through each method.

Option 1: Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks

If you‘ve determined that pingbacks and trackbacks are not essential to your blog‘s growth and community engagement, and moderating them has become more trouble than it‘s worth, you may choose to completely disable the feature. Here‘s how to turn pingbacks and trackbacks off for your entire WordPress blog:

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings > Discussion.
2. Under "Default post settings," uncheck the box next to "Allow link notifications from other sites (pingbacks and trackbacks)."
3. While you‘re at it, you may also want to uncheck "Allow people to submit comments on new posts" if you want to disable comments entirely.
4. Scroll down and click the "Save Changes" button.

Once you‘ve saved your changes, pingbacks and trackbacks will be disabled for all new posts you publish going forward. However, you‘ll also need to disable them on any existing posts:

5. Go to Posts > All Posts in your dashboard.
6. Select the checkbox at the top of the list to select all displayed posts.
7. From the "Bulk Actions" dropdown, select "Edit," then click "Apply."
8. In the bulk editing interface, under "Pings," select "Do not allow." Make sure all other options are set to "—No Change—".
9. Click the "Update" button to apply the changes to all selected posts.
10. If you have more posts than can be displayed on one page, repeat the process by navigating to the next page, selecting all posts, and bulk editing them until pingbacks and trackbacks are disabled on every post.

That‘s it – you‘ve now completely turned off pingbacks and trackbacks across your entire WordPress blog. This is the most foolproof way to eliminate trackback spam, but keep in mind that you‘ll no longer be notified of any legitimate sites linking to you either. For established blogs that don‘t rely on pingbacks for exposure though, disabling them is often the most efficient solution.

Option 2: Use Anti-Spam Plugins and Tools

If you want a more nuanced approach that allows legitimate pingbacks through while blocking the spam, you can implement anti-spam plugins and tools into your WordPress blog. There are many great free and paid options that will automatically detect known spam indicators and filter those pingbacks into a moderation queue or delete them entirely. Here are a few of the most popular and well-regarded anti-spam WordPress plugins:

1. Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet is one of the most widely used anti-spam plugins for WordPress, developed by the team behind WordPress.com (Automattic). It uses a sophisticated machine learning algorithm to detect spam comments and pingbacks based on a constantly updated global database of known spam indicators. When Akismet detects a suspected spam pingback, it will automatically move it to the Spam folder for you to review. Key features include:

• Automatic spam filtering with a 99.7% accuracy rate
• Option to automatically discard the worst spam so you never see it
• Spam stats and analytics to see what‘s being blocked
• Ability to view false positives and easily recover them from the Spam folder
• Free for personal blogs, paid plans starting at $5/month for businesses

2. Antispam Bee

Antispam Bee is another popular, free WordPress plugin for fighting comment and trackback spam. It takes a slightly different approach than Akismet, using a combination of honey pot and timestamp methods, language filtering, and community-submitted spam data to determine if a pingback is spam. It‘s a good choice if you want more control over your anti-spam settings. Key features include:

• Multiple customizable spam filtering options, including regular expression rules
• Compatible with many other comment plugins like Disqus and wpDiscuz
• Pingback validation to ensure trackbacks are coming from actual websites
• GDPR and DSGVO compliant, with no external API calls
• 100% free and open source

3. Disqus

Disqus is a feature-rich comment hosting platform that replaces WordPress‘s native comment system entirely. Instead of comments being stored in your WordPress database, they‘re hosted and managed on Disqus‘s servers. This not only provides a more user-friendly commenting experience for your audience, but also comes with robust spam filtering features. However, some bloggers may not want to give control of their comments to a third party. Key features include:

• Advanced spam filtering based on user reputation, comment history, and moderator flags
• Option to auto-delete spam or hold it in moderation
• Banned user lists to prevent repeat offenders
• Blacklisted links and keywords
• Toxic and hate speech detection

Other Spam Prevention Tips

In addition to using a plugin, there are some other best practices you can follow to harden your blog against trackback spam:

• Moderate all comments: In your WordPress discussion settings, enable "Comment must be manually approved" so no comments or pingbacks appear on your site without your review. This is especially important for older posts that may be targeted by spam bots.

• Use the "nofollow" attribute: When you link to external sites in your content, add rel="nofollow" to the link HTML. This tells search engines not to pass any link equity through that link, so spammers will have less incentive to target your site for pingbacks.

• Hide your pingback URL: By default, your WordPress site‘s pingback URL is displayed in the source code of every page. You can hide it by adding the following code to your theme‘s functions.php file:

function hide_pingback_url( $headers ) {
    unset( $headers[‘X-Pingback‘] );
    return $headers;
}
add_filter( ‘wp_headers‘, ‘hide_pingback_url‘ );

• Blacklist repeat spammers: If you notice a certain IP address or domain repeatedly sending spam pingbacks, you can block them entirely by adding their information to your .htaccess file. For example, to block a specific IP address, add this line:

Deny from 123.45.67.89

Or to block an entire domain:

SetEnvIf Referer "spammydomain.com" spambot
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=spambot

• Stay vigilant: Even with the best preventative measures in place, a few spam pingbacks may still slip through from time to time. Make a habit of regularly checking your comments for anything suspicious, and mark spam as soon as you see it to improve your plugin‘s detection capabilities over time.

Don‘t Let Trackback Spam Derail Your Blogging Success

Trackback and pingback spam may seem like an occasional nuisance, but letting it run rampant on your blog can have serious consequences for your brand reputation, audience trust, and search rankings. As a blogger, you‘ve worked hard to create quality content and build a community around your site – don‘t let spammers piggyback off your efforts and tarnish what you‘ve built.

The good news is that armed with the right knowledge and tools, preventing trackback spam is completely within your control. Whether you choose to disable pingbacks and trackbacks completely, or implement anti-spam plugins to automatically filter them, taking a proactive stance against spam will pay dividends for your blog in the long run.

By maintaining a spam-free environment, you‘ll cultivate a more engaged and loyal audience, protect your search rankings, and save yourself countess hours of tedious comment moderation. Most importantly, you‘ll safeguard your blog‘s integrity and trustworthiness – priceless assets for any blogger.

So if you‘re not already taking steps to prevent trackback spam, I urge you to make it a priority. Audit your current comment settings, decide on the best spam prevention method for your needs, and start implementing these changes today. Your future blogging self will thank you.