[Plugin: Spam Free WordPress] enable trackbacks and pingbacks?

If you’re using another plugin to filter out pingback spam, then that should explain why I no longer offer the option to turn pingbacks on.

Pingbacks are mostly spam. Even a single spam pingback can hurt your blog’s SEO ranking in search engines like Google. Part of what my plugin does is eliminate any chance of a SEO rank downgrade. Google does not honor the “nofollow” tag on links like they used to, which is one reason my plugin disables html in comments optionally.

If pingbacks don’t bring you any additional traffic, and can hurt your SEO rank, then it is best to save yourself the headache by turning them off.

The older plugin version 1.5.1 allows you to leave pingbacks open.

Thanks for explanation, I was hoping to remove a code or something to enable pingbacks once I can handle spamming and keep to date the plugin, anyways I will use the older plugin version 1.5.1 for now, thank you very much!

Why is this marked resolved? I would like to leave pingbacks enabled but premoderated. Can we do this?

We have to check the code, I am sure if we find the right code and remove it then the issue will resolved!

We can use the old version for now but what about a few months later, maybe WordPress will release a newest version which the plugin will not support!

I am surprised to hear disagreement over the value of pingbacks, which I believe only hurt a blog’s SEO ranking, and are mostly spam. I have also found many new WordPress users overwhelmed when they could not stop floods of pingback spam, because they thought they were comments, and didn’t realize pingbacks and comments are not the same, although they both appear on the same comments edit screen.

Despite our differing opinions, it is critical to preserve the choices available for pingbacks. With this in mind, and in response to your welcome input on this topic, I have released version 1.6.7, which allows pingbacks and trackbacks to be turned on or off as you choose.

As explained I’m using a plugin to handle pingbacks spam so this is not heart my site seo. Using pingbacks and trackbanks is a great way to build backlinks and create traffic. Thank you very much Todd!

Thanks Todd. I’ll upgrade as soon as I get time. I think my sites get very little spam that way, so I suspect the pingback-spammers are mostly finding sites that display pingbacks without moderation and then flooding in.

i get like 60 trackbacks a day on my school notes site and am just approving alll of them since then i see my ranking skyrocketed