January 27, 2012 
Make trackbacks invisible
Yesterday I spoke about how you can use trackbacks to boost your blog’s traffic. Today we’re going to look at how we can get rid of the pesky things on your own blog.
There is a reason why trackbacks are hidden on so many blogs – they are a real pain to manage. Spam trackbacks aside, there are the trackbacks produced by interlinking your posts (which you should of course be doing religiously). And the real hassle is in checking genuine trackbacks to make sure that you want to link back to whatever post has linked to you.
It’s exhausting, right? The ideal solution would be to stop trackbacks and pingbacks from displaying on your post pages, without them disappearing from the backend. In that scenario, you could continue to monitor links to your blog if you wanted to.
Well, you can easily get half the job done. You just need to head over to Settings > Discussion and uncheck the relevant box:
There are two problems with this method:
- It prevents you from knowing when people link to you (i.e. trackbacks disappear on the front and back end)
- It does not remove trackbacks that have already been published on previous posts
But fear not – as is often the case, there is a plugin that provides the ideal solution! Just install and activate Hide Trackbacks. Old trackbacks will be removed from your blog posts, new trackbacks won’t appear, but you will still see them on your Dashboard.
Whilst it would seem that the plugin is getting rather long in the tooth (having last been updated in May 2011 according to WordPress.org), I contacted the plugin’s owner and he informed me that he is using it for his own blog on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, I tested the plugin on my own blog and it worked perfectly.
Creative Commons photo courtesy of Diogo A. Figueira
Tom Ewer on Google+
