Has the term WordPress Pingback ever echoed in your ears? If you have heard of this term, but aren’t quite sure what it means, there’s no need for concern. This comprehensive guide will shed light on what WordPress pingback is, why you might want to disable it, and how to do so.
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Understanding WordPress Pingback
Pingback in WordPress is a feature that notifies you when content from your website has been linked in content on another website. This feature can only work if you have permitted or activated it. You can find the pingback feature in the Discussion submenu within the Settings menu. Besides pingback, there’s a feature known as trackback which has a somewhat opposite meaning to pingback.
Trackback is a feature that alerts another website that the content it owns has been linked in the content you have created on your website. Like pingback, to make trackback function, it must be activated or allowed first. At a glance, these two features seem incredibly beneficial and can get you a multitude of backlinks. However, there are drawbacks associated with using both of these features.
The Purpose of Pingback
The primary role of Pingback is to alert you that the content on your website has been mentioned, discussed, or referenced in the form of a link on another site. Via this feature, you’ll receive a notification as soon as the link to your website is posted in another site’s content. Pingback can only function effectively if both you and the website hosting your link have activated the pingback and trackback features. Read more: Comparative Advantage Explained: Guide & Real Examples
The information you gather from the pingback feature includes the anchor text and URL of the pingback post, the title of the website or pingback content, the URL of the pingback content, and a quote from the pingback content. If used wisely, pingback can be a useful feature for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). However, not a few people recommend deactivating pingback.
Pros and Cons of Using WordPress Pingback
Here are the benefits and drawbacks of activating the WordPress pingback feature.
Benefits of Using Pingback
Here are 4 benefits of using pingback:
- Enhancing backlinks to your website. This will drive traffic to your site while improving your SEO quality.
- Boosting the image and popularity of content. With your content being mentioned on other websites, the image and popularity of your content and website will escalate.
- Opening new relations. Having your content pingbacked can open new relations and connections with other parties who include your content link, resulting in potential collaborations and mutually beneficial sharing opportunities.
- Enhancing content value and visitor experience. Your content visitors will surely appreciate if your content includes links providing similar or related content.
Drawbacks of Using Pingback
Here is one major drawback of using pingback:
The pingback feature is highly susceptible to exploitation by spammers. Pingbacked content might contain spam or irrelevant content. This not only poses a security risk for WordPress websites, but also requires you to manually check each notification to identify whether it contains spam or not. As a result, you may end up wasting time and facing hassles.
Pingback and trackback features are not always beneficial. With each passing day, more spammers are exploiting these features. Since being utilized by spammers to send spam via pingback, this feature has indeed become controversial. There’s always an option to deactivate it and use other methods to boost traffic and improve your content and SEO quality.
How to Disable WordPress Pingback
The pingback feature can be activated and deactivated anytime. Deactivation methods also vary. Besides pingback, you can also deactivate self pingback. Self pingback appears when you include a link to your website in the content you create on your own website. Self pingback can be very annoying, so it is highly recommended to deactivate it.
Disabling pingback isn’t difficult, whether through a plugin or not. There are four ways to disable pingback on a WordPress website. These are through the No Self Pings plugin, through the Disabler plugin, via WordPress Settings, and via Posts.
Conclusion
The four aforementioned methods are effective and tested ways to disable WordPress pingback. In addition to pingback, these methods can also be applied to disable self pingback. Many web developers today opt to disable pingback due to the rampant rise of spammers and the dynamic and increasingly diverse nature of SEO, making the deactivation of pingback a recommended action.
