Alex Mills

When it comes to spam and <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#Pingbacks" rel="nofollow ugc">pingbacks</a>/<a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#Trackbacks" rel="nofollow ugc">trackbacks</a>, the vast majority by far is via trackbacks rather than pingbacks. Very, very few people use trackbacks for legitimate uses anymore (I’ve gotten less than 5 in the last 8 months) as WordPress, etc. all use pingbacks now as their primary ping method.
I had already installed <a href="http://ocaoimh.ie/cookies-for-comments/" rel="nofollow ugc">Cookies For Comments</a> which successfully stops most spam comments but I still had to deal with the tons of trackback spam. So, I wrote this plugin.
It will disable new trackbacks across your site, both legitimate and spam. However since very few people use trackbacks legitimately, this combined with Cookies For Comments should cut your spam down to next to zero.
Why should I use this plugin over one of those trackback validator plugins?
Most non-Akismet style anti-trackback spam plugins work by connecting to the URL that sent the trackback and looking for a link to your blog. The problem with this is that many spammers actually post links to your blog in their spam posts rendering those types of plugins useless. Even those that check the IP address to make sure it matches are beaten by spam blogs (aka splogs).
In the end it’s up to you what to use for anti-spam, but I personally use Cookies For Comments, this plugin, and then Akismet to catch anything that makes it through.

Disable Trackbacks

Globally disables trackbacks to cut down on spam. Very, very few people legitimately use trackbacks and spammers love them, so it's worthy tradeo …

Gabriel Koen

** This plugin now works! ** It broke shortly after I originally uploaded it last year. People are still downloading it, so I decided to make it work. I revamped it and made it totally compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
External Related Posts takes the category, tags or custom taxonomy from your post (or custom post type) and searches Google Blog Search for related posts. External Related Posts then adds a link to that blog to your post and pings them, letting them know you made a relevant post on their subject.
Controls exist for how many blogs to search for, whether to only post links to blogs that accept pingbacks, how many pingbacks to perform, and a randomizer for how often External Related Posts activates (e.g., every post, 50% of your posts, 25% of your posts).
Github: https://github.com/mintindeed/external-related-posts
WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/external-related-posts/
Image by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/3773116901/" rel="nofollow ugc">Toban Black</a>; some rights reserved. See link for details.
<h3>Licence</h3>
External Related Posts is released under GPL v2.

External Related Posts

Grabs related links from Google Blog Search, inserts a link to them into your post and gives them a pingback.

Disable Trackbacks vs External Related Posts