Pingbacks are those little snippets of text that get inserted into your comments section whenever someone links to your blog from another site. You can turn them on or off and, I believe, they need to be enabled on the originating site as well. For some folks they can be really useful as a way to both see and show to others who’s linking to their blog. It’s similar to the concept of followers on Twitter. It’s a record of who’s talking about you.
Pingback Settings
The problem for me is I almost never get pingbacks, with two exceptions. The first is spam. On occasion I’ve gotten pingbacks that were spam. This has mostly been cured by installing some anti-spam plugins. The other exception, however, is me. I link to myself all the time. And every time I do I get a pingback in the linked post. I don’t really want these there, though, so I have to go and delete them. It’s a pain.
You would think WordPress would have a setting to block pingbacks from itself. Alas, I can find no such setting. Since I almost never get pingbacks from others, I think I’ll go ahead and turn them off. The annoyance to usefulness ratio is just way to big.
4 Comments
Have you tried the no-self-ping plugin?
I put it on my 2.8 WP install a while back and it seems to still work fine (the plugin was last updated in 2007).
The solution is to remove your domain name from the start of self links, i.e. make them all /category/whatever.html
Why don’t you want your own pingbacks? They can be useful to readers to be able to see later references when a search takes them to an old post.
Hm. Both Ed’s and Ryan’s suggestions sound good. I’ll look into those.
I guess self-pingbacks could be useful in a limited fashion. But they’re a bit ugly in the “Recent Comments” section, and I tend to get more self-pingbacks than comments. It makes it look like I’m just talking to myself, which, even if true, isn’t how I’d like the site to appear.
Of course, lately comments have been up. So I should give this all another look in the near-ish future. As things change, perhaps self-pingbacks could be useful after all.
-systemsboy