JL Forums

Hi Geeman,

Personally I would just delete them, they would just look wierd if you accepted them as comments under your posts, zero value to the reader, and just fill up the page with pointlessness. The pings backs just show you that you have link coming to you wp blog from another wp blog, they are not the link in theselves and google is not going to pick them up in your wordpress dashboard and give them any value. Deleting the ping backs will not delete the links on the blogs they are coming from.

Darren

Totally the right answer Darren, as a matter of fact I just had to delete 289 
useless spam links to my WP Blog...

HJ
   Spam comments suck. You can, however, stop ping-backs and track-backs altogether in the wp admin. Go to settings -> discussion, and then check uncheck the box on that page about receiving track-backs and ping-backs.

Darren

Sure glad to read this post Darren,

I had no idea that I could stop receiving them so easily...

HoneyJo

easy come, easy go 

Heya Darren 123, you mentioned a plug in against comment spam elsewhere, "behave yourself" or some such, what was the name again?

Thanks,

Mark

Can I offer an alternate view?

Trackbacks are a part of the blogging ecosystem. They are a way of telling other sites that one has just quoted something from another site.

A trackback is one of three types of linkback methods for website authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to their articles. Some weblog software, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Movable Type, supports automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of linkback.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback

On sites that I care about I never stop trackbacks. On sites I sell, likewise.

The problem is that Trackbacks are, by default, enabled as auto-accept on WP sites even when comments are disabled or set to moderation/approval. This means that they catch the unknowing unaware.

I think it is worth knowing that others have linked to our sites and for others to know when we link to theirs - and we DO understand that linking to external sites is a part of good on-page SEO, yes?

The issue we face is that because of the default settings on WP we are open to trackback spamming from sites who plant a fake trackback - where there is no incoming link. This can be a massive issue and is probably at the root of the problems that most of us face.

I use a plugin called Spam Karma. This is a great plugin that was for a while not developed but that was open sourced and reissued. Used in conjunction with Akismet spam comments and trackbacks will simply become a non-issue. In this context the most important thing is that SK will check that all trackbacks are 'real', that is, they have a corresponding link on the incoming site.

Don't kill trackbacks, they, like comments are a sure sign that your site is interesting, has value and is worth linking to.

On sites that I care about I never stop trackbacks. On sites I sell, likewise.

I do too with the help of Spam Karma. Fortunately it is still working. Since most of the plugins stop working when they are not supported anymore, I was sad when the developper announced he was giving up due the constant upgrading of WP.

Why in the world would you suggest deleting these pingbacks??? These are the links you built to your site. Find the best way to make use of them...

I'm not to familiar with the plugin Spam Karma, but if it works to reduce spam great. There is nothing more annoying than blog spam, but for those of us who have outsourced or used programs like Scrapebox for junk blog comment links... "what comes around goes around"!!!

I wanted to add my 2 cents and some input on the initial question about pingbacks and the thousands of links from article marketing. Pingbacks and trackbacks are Wordpress's inbuilt system to notifying blog owners when links are passed in between user blogs. These pingbacks and trackbacks are great for natural links if you desire to put in the time. For example when you link to another blog from within your post (i.e. content curation, or just a thumbs up for a blog you really like) you can create a trackback letting that blog owner know you linked to them, with hopes they will link back to you... "natural linking"

The pingback is a notification that a blog has linked to you. This is an opportunity... DO NOT delete these. In the comments section of Wordpress you have approved, pending, and not approved. Approved will show up in your posts, pending just sits there in the database really not doing anything, and here is what to do with the not approved. Filter all the comments by comments first... then clear spam. You are left with the pingbacks, all the blogs/articles with links to your site. Select all and click Not Spam, this will simply move all these pingbacks to your pending comments.

There are a couple plugins to help manage these pingbacks and for GOOD reason. Pingbacks are your proof of backlinks from other blogs. The one I use is Pingback Optimizer which will group your pingbacks into groups and submit them to RSS aggregators, which will help get these links indexed. You can also use Pingback Optimizer, and in my opinion the biggest benefit, to download ALL these links to a txt or csv file for further use, such as submitting them to BacklinksIndexer. There is also another plugin by Konrad Braun, I think it is called Ping Automatic.

We spend way to much time creating backlinks to just let them disappear into cyberspace. And remember a link that isn't indexed is really just a waste of a link. Keep track of these links and use an automated system (to save you time) to increase the likely hood of these links getting indexed and passing that link juice to your site.

Cheers
Doug