Do Not Ping Your Own WordPress Blog!
24 February 2008
23 CommentsWordPress 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…
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Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with self-pings. In fact, I see it as a good thing since you are increasing the internal linking within your site. What I did for my blog is to separate the pings from the comments so that the commentators will not have a hard time reading the comments.
I think self-pings are fine, because that’s another way for the reader to see that there is a related article on this blog.
Moreover, I think that the Recent Comments widget is quite useless because commentators will always enter the article page to see the complete conversation.
And if a blog needs a comment incentive, then the top commentators plugin would much more productive.
Cheers,
Alex.
Great Post as usual, you “pinged” the nail on the head! Pinging yourself is redundant and a waste. I do agree with Alex that the recent comments plug in is wasted and useless. Top Comenters makes more sense for networking
Unfortunately, the Top Commentators plugin ain’t working on my installation. I’ll be working on it after college today.
And Like there are two sides to Self-Pinging, there are two sides to Recent Comments Widget. While Top Commentators plugin lets you reward the top commentators at your blog… Recent Comments help your readers track what post has been most active on your blog recently. This may act as an Inspirit for them to head to the post and participate in the discussion.
Will definitely take this post into consideration. Not sure if doing it will hurt you or not. Will wait to see how others feel.
Added to TopStumbles:
http://www.topstumbles.com/industrynews/do-not-ping...
Hey thanks GeoServ!
BTW, I thought this service was going to be some kind of StumbleUpon pump… Thanks for the link anyway. Hope to see some traffic flowing in from this network.
For now its just a site for users to submit anything they find using StumbleUpon that they think fellow members would like.
I have it setup so users can put their StumbleUpon RSS ID in their profile, and the site will add anything they thumb up automatically.
Its a work in progress, but I think it could be successful someday.
I am now a frequent visitor here.
Wow! Thats good news. And Wish you the best of luck with your undertaking.
I wonder before if we can ping our wordpress blog but it seems that it would just delay the process although there is some people still using “Ping-O-Matic” . But it seems that your plug in is also worth a try so I might try it out as well in some of my blogs. What I keep in mind is that you just need to ping real useable content.
The best thing I can do for this wonderful source is to say that I’m a biggest fan of this website
excellent. i didnt even know wordpress did this until 10 minutes ago. trying out the plugin now.
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Great post. Good advice and suggestions as usual.
I suppose it really depends on whether you have a social blog or not. I don’t do social blogging any more but when I did I always deleted the pingbacks manually. I knew that there was a plugin to stop it happening but never seemed to get round to installing it. With my “money” blogs I just leave the pingbacks so that there is increased internal linking.
[...] not ping your own wordpress blog! http://www.inspiritblog.com/?p=74 [...]
Thanks for the useful post, and debate in the comments. There are pros and cons to KeywordLuv and CommentLuv. For me, CommentLuv has a slight advantage as it provides a deep-link to a blog post, as well as a general link to the homepage. Assuming you have keywords in your post-titles, you get the best of both.
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I thought that internal linking within a site is important for SEO reasons. I didn’t realize that trackbacks were happening when linking to other posts within a site, but it was my understanding that it does help your site by internally linking within a blog.
Devins latest published blog-post ………. Best Burger Deal on Campus
I don\’t normally leave comments… but I really enjoyed your post! I will be leaving a link back here in my blogroll! Thanks!
Internal linking is very important, and if its done right with the right types of anchor text, you will notice a very large increase in your SERPS..
Pinging still works, and it has worked for me for years…. Even for my own posts..
Hey, very interesting post.
My written English is not so good so I write in German:
“Lieber den Spatz in der Hand, als die Taube auf dem Dach.”
Yours sincerely
Luxus
Its a work in progress, but I think it could be successful someday.
Information I was not aware of. Thank you!
shawns latest published blog-post ………. Clean Red Widgets On The Attack
I can see your point about top commentsor recent comments being all of yours. If you only post every now and then i am sure it is fine but if you write alot that would look like your the only one on the site. Great post did not even think about recent comments and how track back effects them.
I will try this anti-self ping plugin and will check on what will be it’s effect in one of my wordpress blog.