Semalt: How To Stop WordPress Trackback & Pingback Spam

Trackbacks and pingbacks are an excellent way for publishers and bloggers to share insights with their fans and continue meaningful and useful conversations with the readers and followers via their writing. The trackbacks are believed to be external WordPress comments. For instance, if a website is using different blogging software and links to your articles, it will manually send notifications to let you know about its activities. On the other hands, pingbacks are exclusive to WordPress. It means someone can link to your articles or blog posts only when both of you are using WordPress as the primary content management system. In that case, both of your websites should enable pingbacks so that the posts can be referenced properly. A lot of spammers continue spamming the trackbacks and pingbacks every day.

You don't need to worry as Frank Abagnale, a leading expert from Semalt, provides here some easy-to-follow ways to get rid of them and prevent them in future.

Topsy Blocker:

A Topsy Blocker works in different ways, and it aims to analyze the trackbacks and pingbacks your site receives daily. It also checks your comments and removes the illegitimate sources such as topsy.com. If a sender turns out to be from any such websites, the trackbacks and pingbacks will be set as spam automatically. You just need to install and activate this tool to make sure that your site remains free from spam comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks.

Antispam Bee:

It's safe to say that Antispam Bee is a famous and most powerful choice for WordPress bloggers. It has over 200,000 active installs and is the only option to validate the trackbacks and pingbacks easily. In addition, this tool checks the most accurate comments and removes the inaccurate comments from your website. You can install it from the Settings > Antispam Bee option, and the program is free of cost. Its default settings can be edited anytime, based on your requirements and blog's niche. However, its default settings are enough to go with if you own a private blog or a startup website.

WP-SpamShield Anti-Spam:

WP-SpamShield is an outstanding and amazing program you should consider as it helps get rid of pingbacks and trackbacks. It automatically inserts the Captcha on your site and asks all the visitors to enter that Captcha for verification purposes. However, some of your readers may not be convinced with that verification process so you can edit it accordingly. This system will not block bots that will crawl your blog or website. Instead, you will get rid of the spam comments, and this plugin works exactly like the firewalls. Spam comments are blocked themselves, but you can configure the settings from the admin area and click on the Settings > WP-SpamShield option.

Conclusion - Automatic mark the comments as spam if they contain the blacklist keywords:

Besides the above methods, WordPress lets us check the comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks easily so that we can mark them spam if something is irrelevant. Any comments containing the keywords or phrases should be blocked and removed from your posts instantly. Even when you don't receive the notifications, you should simply delete those comments from your WordPress' admin area.