Can anyone help me whether it is necessary to have pingbacks and trackbacks switched on, as I read many conflicting articles, with most saying it should be on, although many of the articles are from years ago.
On my site, most of the pingbacks are from internal content, so again is this good or should they be deleted.
With SEO changing all the time, just wanted to know a more modern up to date opinion.
Many Thanks.
I think there is a difference in asking “Should I have pingbacks and trackbacks enabled?” vs. “Does pingbacks and trackbacks help my SEO?”
In terms of user experience, having “related articles” may be a better choice than having pingback links amongst your comments.
In terms of the search engine part of SEO, I think that external links benefit you, not internal links.
I think there would be more benefit creating, maintaining and submitting a decent site map.
I think what pingbacks may be useful for, is letting other authors know that you’ve linked to their content.
So I should keep them on, but it sounds better to delete the internal pingbacks (not the links within articles) just the pingbacks in the comments.
Or am I over simplifying it.
I would not keep internal pingbacks.
But there is no one answer to “should I or shouldn’t I”.
The answer is pretty much always “It depends”.
Back in their day, themes were still quite rudimentary.
Now, themes allow for their function to be met much more efficiently through other means.
I will get rid of the internal ones then I think.
Many thanks for your help.
Pingbacks are really just intended to let you know that someone linked your article on their blog – it’s a dated and incomplete way to go about learning this information. Internal pingbacks aren’t needed; for this, you can cross-link your posts in the content. As far as external pingbacks, this functionality has been used to DDos sites in the past. I’m not sure of the state of it these days, but, I disable it.
Yes, this. And from a UX perspective it is more useful.
In general, pingbacks/trackbacks are useless. More, they are annoying. They add nothing. 15 years ago, they had some minor value, but today they are considered as spam, not a good practice.
(Context: my daily job is marketing and UI/UX.)
If I remember correctly, in CP v2 they will be separated from the core to the core plugin.
Many thanks everyone, have disabled the pingbacks and removed the internal ones as well.
If it is going out of v2 then there doesn’t seem much point in having it switched on, especially after what you have all said about them anyway.
What exactly will be moved out into a core plugin in v2 has not been decided yet, we will be looking at Issues · ClassicPress/ClassicPress · GitHub and available dev time in order to make those decisions.
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