Guide To Blogging

Archive for the ‘Blogroll’ Category

As blog owners there’s no doubt that at some point you’ve had to deal with spam comments, whether that’s just one here or there or in some cases 10 or more a day.

Often spam seems to work on some sort of tidal phase; you get nothing then they roll on in on a wave of spam comment after comment then roll on out again and you’re left alone for awhile.

There may be a lot of different factors that determine the amount of spam/paid comments etc that you receive: the type of blog you have, whether you have DoFollow on your blogs (I’ve mentioned this in the past, but here’s a post about it that’s well worth reading Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My! ) and in my opinion the title of your post

All my blogs have Aksimet and moderated posts (if it gets through Aksimet I get an email telling me there’s a new comment and I decide whether to approve it or not) and for the most part that’s great (yes Akismet occasionally misses one or makes a mistake and spams something that shouldn’t have been but that’s pretty rare and easy to change) but lately I’ve been inundated with spam on one particular post I made on another blog - it’s not an old post by any means (in fact it’s still sitting on the front page of that blog) which made me realise I only ever receive spam/paid comments on certain posts.

So does that mean there are certain keywords or phrases that we use that cause the flood of spam or has it so far been coincidental? After all for the most part if we’re talking SEO etc we all try to use words or phrase that will draw the search engine traffic to our blogs but are we in turn drawing those spammers as well?

Oh and for the record for you 30 or so people (so far) that are trying to recruit me for a company based in Shanghai I’m not interested.

When it comes to blogging most of us like to know who is linking to our blog often for a variety of reasons; where our traffic is coming from, so we can visit them easily, so we can return the favour etc.

There’s many ways we can keep track of where our incoming links are coming from; using a statcounter of some sort, via technorati, wordpress has the incoming links in your dashboard etc etc.

For many blog owners they in turn want to say thanks for the link or put a reciprocal link in their blogroll or on a separate page, in a post or whatever other means they may use to say thanks for the linkage, sometimes the problem with this comes when those return links or posts end up moving deeper and deeper into your blog and you end up not giving the incoming linker the promotion you feel they deserve.

There’s many ways you can show your appreciation for those that take the time to link to or comment on your blog; adding a top or recent commentors  plugin, creating a separate page or manually adding those links to your blogroll etc.

Or you could try some of these plugins

wholinked add to the sidebar of you blog which shows the incoming links - available for different blog formats

Technorati Incoming Links Widget 

This one - who link here is in Spanish but here’s a translated version 

Once you’ve decided on what theme you want for your blog and you’ve both uploaded it and changed it in your presentation menu you may soon find there’s a few other things you need to do.

While a lot of the basics stay the same with wordpress themes there are often a few differences. The first thing you’ll want to check is whether your new theme will accept any plugins you had used in the past.  If they are okay you may want to double check on your rss feed (while a standard wordpress feed is yourblogurl/feed this can sometimes get messed up if you change designs etc - a good suggestion when submitting rss feeds is to burn your feed at somewhere like feedburner etc so you get standard feed that can be used anywhere)

It will also pay to check any changes you’d previously made in your separate pages - your header, 404 page etc as these may not always transfer across. For example if you’d used an image in your header you may need to edit your header.php file (via the presentation/theme editor tab) to ensure your image is linked/visible.

Those are a few of the more common differences and as always I suggest before making too many wholesale changes to things you save any codes etc.