Blogging and Marketing Resources for the Average Blogger and Business
Posts tagged DoFollow
Akismet Continues to Capture
May 31st
Akismet Rocks!
When I originally installed the Akismet plug-in to my WordPress blog, I posted an early set of stats on its SPAM filtering success. After several weeks of blocking the foul SPAM, I am pleased to provide a quick update.
With over 700 SPAM messages caught, Akismet is working at an astonishing 99+% accuracy! The very, very few messages I have to deal with is a breeze considering the dozens a day I used to delete.
Why am I sharing this with you? My hope is that due to continued excellent SPAM fighting with a simple tool like Akismet, I’m hoping WordPress will eventually be configured with an option to turn off the NO FOLLOW process. The NO FOLLOW approach to reducing SPAM is outdated and needs to go away.
Dave
Amazing Akismet Spam Fighting
May 9th
Akismet Doing the Job
As part of my recent DoFollow sojourn, I discovered an excellent spam fighting tool already contained in WordPress: Akismet. This was an excellent discovery, since my spam cleanup activities were loosing the battle – badly.
Akismet Key is Key
As a simple plug-in, it installed easily and only took a step to activate.
WordPress.com provides users with an API key that allows the Akismet activation. Since this is your control device for fighting spam, treat it as you would any other closely-guarded password.
As you can see, in the three days since I installed mine, Akismet has caught 75 (33/13/29) spam attempts successfully! To put this into perspective, I was previously deleting individual spam comments as a part of my moderation process. Big time saver. As important to catching the spam, Akismet did this with 100% accuracy. This means that each catch was accurate. In my review, I did not find any caught erroneously, nor were any missed. Wow!
If you find Akismet misses one, or if it wrongfully flags an entry, not to worry. Mark it as spam on the Dashboard or approve it, and Akismet learns from the process!
Between DoFollow and Akismet, I feel I have tremendously improved the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit – all in the last few days!
Dave
Dofollow (No Nofollow) for Improved Search Engine Rank
May 8th
DoFollow Used Here!
A comment offered in a previous post, Entrecard Boosting Traffic, caused me to learn something new, and quite important: the DoFollow / NoFollow dilemma. A new concept for me, but one worth exploring.
First, some background. Blogs and web sites are of course ranked by search engines in a number of ways. One is the number of links from other places on the Internet back to that site. Basically, a show of popularity. The problem with this is the incentive for spammers to comment with nothing but links back to their sites, mostly in automated ways, to simply fill up the comment with opportunities for the Googles of the world to more highly rank their sites. All at the intellectual expense of honorable blogs.
In 2005, Google postulated that if they did not provide any ranking merit when they found the attribute, “rel=nofollow” on blogs, and not follow the link back for merit ranking purposes, bloggers and blog platforms would adopt the setting. The rationale was that it would be a disincentive for spammers and spamming would, well, stop. Right.
WordPress, as one blogging platform, adopted the setting. The challenge for us “average” bloggers on the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit is the lack of awareness of (at least for many of us) this obscure parameter.
I am pleased to announce that the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit is now set up to use DoFollow! The good people at Semiologic provided the DoFollow plugin now used here. Anyone familiar with WordPress plugins will appreciate the simple ZIP file download and install. Now, the dreaded NoFollow setting has been disabled!
As an alternate view of this link juice topic, the folks at eVisibility provide an excellent visual example of how the flow of link juice occurs. Their point is different, in that they are discussing the value of using or not using NoFollow strategically – I just like the graphics.
As a topic for a future post, the other shoe to drop on this topic is the management of spam. A great tool in Akismet, coming soon!
Dave
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