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Trackbacks is a WordPress feature that will notify a blog when your blog publish an entry that references it. A link with a short excerpt of your blog entry will appear on the referenced blog. Unfortunately, Spam Bots usually use the trackbacks feature to deliver spams. However, you can actually disable it. To disable trackbacks, there are at least two ways: via the Admin panel and using SQL query.

Via the Admin panel

The first method is via the Admin panel. In the Admin panel, click on Discussion under the Settings tab. Uncheck “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) ”

Figure 1: Disable the trackbacks

Using SQL query

The second method is by using SQL query. If you have SSH access, you can run the SQL query below in the MySql client. Otherwise, you could use the phpMyAdmin tool, that is usually comes with cPanel, which is the most convenient way to manage the database.

UPDATE wp_options
    SET option_value = 'closed'
    WHERE
        wp_options.option_id =20
        AND
        wp_options.blog_id =0;

Figure 2: Click on phpMyAdmin icon

To run the SQL query in phpMyAdmin, first, click on phpMyAdmin icon in cPanel, as shown in Figure 2. Once you are in phpMyAdmin, select your WordPress database, from the drop down menu on the left. The page will refresh and the database’s tables will be displayed on it. Open the SQL tab (look at the top navigation bar), as shown in Figure 3. Paste the SQL query, and click Go. The database will be updated, and the trackbacks will be disabled.

Figure 3: The SQL tab

Conclusion

I have shown you 2 ways to disable the trackbacks in this article. However, if you still need the trackbacks feature, you could use plugin like Akismet to help reduce the spam.