Do you want to disable trackbacks and pings on your old WordPress posts? Trackbacks and pingbacks allow blogs to notify each other that they have linked to a post. However, today it is mainly used by spammers to send trackbacks from spam websites. In this article, we will show you how to disable trackbacks and pings on existing WordPress posts.
In the early days of blogging, trackbacks and pingbacks were introduced as a way for blogs to notify each other about links.
Let's say you write an article and add a link to a post on your friend's blog. Your blog will automatically ping your blog.
This pingback will appear in your blog's comment moderation queue with a link to your website.
However, today this feature is mainly used by spammers to send thousands of fake trackbacks and pings. Even if you are using Akismet, some of these trackbacks may still enter your moderation queue.
WordPress allows you to disable this feature. You can do this by going to Settings »Discussion Page and then uncheck the box next to 'Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) in new articles' option.
However, it only disables them on any new article you post. All your old posts will still have trackbacks and pingbacks enabled. WordPress will even add trackbacks to those posts whenever you link to them on your own blog. See our guide on how to disable auto pingbacks in WordPress.
Let's see how to easily disable trackbacks and pings on existing WordPress posts.
First you need to visit Posts »All Posts page and then click the Screen Options button in the upper right corner of the screen.
Now enter 999 next to the 'Number of items per page' option and then click the Apply button.
This will reload the list of posts, and will now display up to 999 posts on the same page.
Next, you need to select all the posts by checking the box next to the title tag.
After that, you need to select 'Edit' from the Bulk Actions dropdown and click the 'Apply' button.
WordPress will now show you a bulk edit box with all the posts on the selected page.
In the bulk edit box, you need to find the pings option and then change it to 'Don't allow'.
Then just click the update button to save your changes.
WordPress will now update and disable pings on all selected posts.
If you have more than 999 posts on your WordPress site, you need to go to 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 tips and tools to combat WordPress comment spam.
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