WordPress sends pings to your own site when you link to other posts on your blog internally! This appears as a pingback on the post you have linked to, in the comments section. While it makes it easier to leave a trail of inter-related posts, I find this feature of WordPress quite absurd!
When you link to a previous blog entry, it becomes a trackback to that entry from the new one. It also provides a forward link to the latest published post and some may love it, but what I don’t like about this behavior is that it appears in the recent comments widget. Added to my own responses to the comments on Inspirit, it looks like its only me who ever comments on my blog. Moreover, it adds to the clutter in the comments section as self-pings are quite meaningless and useless to the audience.
No one will ever need to respond to a trackback or a pingback, so I have even set my threaded comments options to exclude trackbacks and pingbacks from the “reply to” list. This means there will be no reply button against any trackback or pingback on my blog, in the comments.
Anyway, let us come back to the point of this post:
How to prevent your WordPress blog from pinging itself?
BlogWaffe.com offers this simple but awesome WordPress plugin called No Self Pings to disable self pinging on your blog. Its easy to install it just like any other plugin:
Installation:
Download the plugin, put it in your WordPress plugins directory, activate it via your WordPress admin panel, and you’re set.
No configuration is necessary, according to the plugin author. This is one of the plugins that I have been using since the inception of my blog without the slightest trouble through any kind of WordPress updates. Nifty Tool!
Another way to prevent self pings is to use relative hyperlinks while linking to your own previously made blog entries. Simply omit the domain name from the link:
instead of: <a href=”http://www.inspiritblog.com/?cat=120″>Category: Comments</a>
Use this: <a href=”/?cat=120″>Category: Comments</a>
And you’ll stop getting self-pings.
There’s also this support topic at WordPress.Org: How do I stop links to other posts in same weblog producing a pingback? that you’ll find helpful.
What do you think, is self pinging healthy? Do you allow self-pings on your WordPress blog? Take a minute to drop a comment and share…