Why you should disable trackbacks on your WordPress blog

Spam trackback in WordPress

On WordPress you have a box right below the text editor titled ‘Send Trackbacks’. If users put the URL of your post there and publish or update their posts, your blog will get a trackback notification and probably put a link on your comments section to that blog. Nice? Not really.

Because if you have a blog or website that runs on WordPress, you probably, or most certainly have noticed that you have to endure lots of trackback powered comment spam. The modus operandi is simple: a blog links to a post on your blog by adding a link under a certain (set of) keyword(s). This creates a trackback in the comment field of your website. However, when you actually go back to the website that powered the trackback you’ll see that it holds nothing but unrelated content and perhaps also your link (but more often than not this link has by then been removed).

The purpose of these trackbacks is simple, the scrupulous website wants to steal some of your page rank / link juice.

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