Tag Archives: trackback

All Pingbacks Must Die

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5

I’ve had my last pingback spam.

Anyone who has a blog knows that the comment feature is what makes a blog stand out from a plain old Web site. The comment feature is what makes a blog interactive, it’s what gives readers a chance to share their point of view or additional information about a topic. It gives them a chance to ask questions and get answers.

The comment feature works with the pingback feature. Pingbacks (which are often referred to as trackbacks) are machine-generated “comments” that are added to a post when another blogger writes a post that links to it.

Huh?

Discussion AreaOkay, think of it this way. You’re blogger A writing post 1. Blogger B writes post 2 that includes a link to post 1. A comment appears on post 1 that links back to post 2. This is all done automatically in WordPress (my blogging platform of choice) if — and this is a big if — you left the Allow Pings option turned on for post 1. You can find the setting for this in the Discussion area of the Write Post administration panel.

Unfortunately, the pingback feature also makes it possible for sploggers to get free links to their sites. A splogger builds content on a blog by stealing it from RSS feeds. Their goal is usually to get hits on their Web sites, which are full of Google AdSense ads, but they sometimes are part of a “link farm” that boosts search engine ranking.

The problem lately is that my sites have been attracting more pingback spam from splogging sites than real pings from legitimate sites and bloggers. These must be manually deleted, since my spam prevention software doesn’t seem able to catch them all. And frankly, I’m a little sick of spending each morning deleting six to twenty of these comments.

So I’m going to stop writing posts with the pingback feature enabled.

And if you’re having this problem on your blog, I recommend that you do the same.

Stop Pinging Your Own WordPress Blog!

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3

A problem resolved becomes a new problem to resolve.

A while back, I complained that the ping and trackback features on my site wouldn’t work. I could get trackbacks and pingbacks, but I couldn’t send them. I even wrote a TrackBack Troubleshooting post about it which has become one of the most widely read posts on my site.

A while later, I moved my blogs to GoDaddy.com. Immediately, the trackback/pingback feature began working. And it’s been working ever since.

Trouble is, when I refer to a older blog entry in my own blog from a new blog entry, the new entry pings the old one, thus creating a trackback “comment.” The comments are ugly and relatively meaningless. Yes, they do provide a forward link to the new and related content, but they also appear in my recent comments list, thus making it look as if I’m the only one who ever comments on my posts. (Not true, but it certainly feels that way sometimes.) And I’m not convinced that the forward link is necessary.

So today I searched the help forums at WordPress.org to see if there was a solution. The answer appeared in a topic titled “How do I stop links to other posts in same weblog producing a pingback?”

There were actually several answers. The simplest was to omit the domain name from the link, creating a relative path:

To summarise, when linking to your own posts, use a relative path, not the full path.

So instead of

I wrote this yesterday

Use this:

I wrote this yesterday

Do that, and you won’t get a ping.

Sounds like an easy enough solution.

But my solution of choice was to use the No Self Pings Plugin available from blogwaffe.com:

Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it lets them easily leave a trail of related posts.

Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments.

So here’s a plugin to disable self pinging.

Two ways to do the same thing. Take your choice.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to delete all the self-pings that have accumulated on this site in the past few months.

Trackback Troubleshooting

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6

I spend most of a day trying to figure out why I can’t send trackbacks from my blog.

If you follow this blog, you’ll know I’m working on a book about WordPress with Miraz Jordan. We split the chapters down the middle, with me getting the first half and Miraz getting the second. One of my chapters covers comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks, three features of WordPress that allow feedback and interactivity between blogs and readers.

On my two WordPress-powered sites, the comments feature works fine. A bit too fine, in fact, as the sites quickly became victims of comment spam. Fortunately, Dr. Dave makes a great comment spam prevention plugin for WordPress called Spam Karma and that catches about 99% of the spam aimed at my two sites. I can easily catch the rest using WordPress’s built-in moderation tools. I’ll be covering all this information in detail in Chapter 4 of our book.

I never really experimented much with the trackback and pingback features. Rather than going into a long, detailed explanation of what these features are, if you’re interested (and can’t wait for the book), you can visit the WordPress Trackback Tutorial on Optiniche.com.

One thing I will point out here is that pingbacks are automatic notification of a blog that your blog refers to it. For example, so far I’ve provided links to two specific blog entries (one on Dr. Dave’s site and one on Optiniche). Because WordPress is configured to automatically notify compatible sites when you link to them, a comment should be created for blog entry I linked to, providing an excerpt from my post and other information. You can see an example on this site from Miraz in the comments on this post. Even the link I just created to my own blog entry should result in a pingback to my blog.

Unfortunately, none of this is working. And yesterday, I spent a good part of the day troubleshooting to find out why. After all, it’s difficult to write about something when you can’t get it to work right.

Don’t get me wrong — I know exactly how it should work. I’ve probably read more about the trackback feature in the past two days than most WordPress users read in their lifetimes. And I tortured Miraz yesterday by asking her to trackback and pingback to my site to make sure I could receive these. (I can.) I just can’t send them.

Oddly enough, I attempted to create a trackback from my demo WordPress.com blog. It appeared to go to its destination, but it never showed up there.

In troubleshooting, I found two possible problems mentioned in the WordPress Codex, both of which will require a visit to the server where the sites reside.

First, there’s some indication that the pings might be “stuck” in a queue, resulting in an endless loop while WordPress tries to send them. I’m not so sure about this. It seems to me if that there was some kind of loop thing going on, WordPress would be bogged down by the effort. Yet my two sites seems to perform okay. Still, the cure seems to be to use some MySQL commands to flush out the contents of the to_ping field. Since I don’t think it will hurt anything to do this, I’ll give it a try.

Other people experiencing this same problem claim that this does not help. One person believes it has to do with a blog getting very large and a memory problem resulting. I can believe this with my blogs. Although I only have about 400 entries in each, the entries in this blog tend to be very lengthy. Add to that my love of customization via plugin and you have a very busy WordPress trying to do all kind of things with lots of data. To fix this, I need to visit my server and make some changes to the php.ini file. (I already tried modifying .htaccess, as the article suggests, but that doesn’t appear to help.)

I’m also thinking at this point that it may have something to do with a recently installed plugin. On this site, my automatic database backup stopped working, although it continues to work reliably on wickenburg-az.com.

Am I pushing WordPress too hard? Perhaps. Hopefully I’ll resolve this problem soon so I can back to work.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for me, please don’t keep them to yourself.

Trackback Tutorial

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A good trackback tutorial on another Web site.

The tutorial, which is quite clear, can be found at WordPress TrackBack Tutorial. it includes a good deal of information about WordPress’s trackback and pingback features, including what they do and how to use them.

I looked up the article because I couldn’t get the feature to work right from this blog. I’m following the instructions and I still can’t get it to work properly. It’s kind of hard to write about something when you can’t get it to work. Very frustrating for me, since I assume I’m just making one tiny mistake over and over.

So this post is yet another attempt at a trackback. Well, actually a pingback. Hopefully, it’ll work.