First day of results
I installed the Google Analyticator plugin to my WordPress yesterday and added this site to my Google Analytics account. The first days results are in, though not staggering by any means. Again, I think it is right where I need to be for what I have done. Here are the stats from the dashboard of Google Analytics for Clear Cut Blogging for my first day:
14 Visits
29 Pageviews
2.07 Pages/Visit
64.29% Bounce Rate
00:03:58 Avg. Time on Site
57.14% % New Visits
Search Engines 10 (71.43%)
Direct Traffic 2 (14.29%)
Referring Sites 2 (14.29%)
So what do I notice about all of this? First, that I am already getting traffic from the search engine Google. Second, my bounce rate is very high. I am not sure what to expect from a site like this, as it is new, but my bounce rate is high on some other sites as well, so it is a concern of mine that the search engines are delivering pages that don’t meet the expectations of the searchers.
Third, I have some sites linking back via trackbacks and what not. That just means I linked to them and the trackback informs them that I linked to them. It is useful to see who is saying what about you. That assumes they linked to you though.
Internet Explorer IE Tab
Internet Explorer (IE) Tab is an add on for Firefox that easily allows you to view your website in IE while never leaving or Firefox or opening IE. It should use the version of IE that you have installed on your computer. Here is some info from the download page:
IE Tab – an extension from Taiwan, features: Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox…
This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox.
Download Internet Explorer (IE) tab here.
Pro Blogger Widget Ready Theme IE 6 Sidebar Problem
My very nice pro blogger widget ready theme has the dreaded IE 6 Sidebar Problem. So whenever anyone looks at it from IE6, the sidebar will shoot down to the bottom of the screen. In Firefox it looks great. IE7 should be ok too, so I always hope and support people moving to Firefox. The cause is the content in the sidebar is too big for some reason, and that causes the blow out. I will play around with sidebar, but I am tempted to just leave it and say “F” the IE6 non conformist technology. I was checking today, which I sometimes to to make sure that my site is the same in Firefox and IE. The next post will speak more about the plugin that allows me to view IE through Firefox.
The Flood Gates are Opening
I have started to get a little drip of search engine traffic. Now, this site has been up for nearly a year with a wordpress installation on it, but I have only been using it for basically 1.5 weeks. I had a hit from a person searching for Permalink Redirect, and I ranked at the bottom of the second page. I checked the data about the site below mine, and it was titled http://silentbits.com/permalink-redirect-wordpress-plugin/. My URL is http://clearcutblogging.com/wordpress-plugins/permalink-redirect/13.
My title is simply permalink redirect (an exact match for the search) and I use the category in the permalink (WordPress Plugins), so I don’t want to duplicate that in the title. I am expecting good things out of this method, so stay tuned. My permalink structure looks like this http://clearcutblogging.com/%category%/%postname%/%postid%. POstname is the title of the post. And to be tricky, sometimes I use the All in one SEO pack plugin to change the post title that you see, and the post title that the search engines display for the site.
Even notice in this post, I have linked to my page again, and also the SEO all in one pack plugin, increasing the internal links on my site. You will want to try and create as many links as you can to your posts so they don’t just fall of the home page and die. The next plugin I will talk about is a related posts plugin.
The homepage of the site below mine in this query was a PR4, and my site has a PR 0, with very few backlinks. So, I think that is a great sign for my site. Hopefully traffic will start to snowball soon.
Spam Her, I Don’t Even Know Her
Every once in a while I cruise through the comments that Aksimet has held back, just to check and see if it has held anything back that wasn’t a spam. My site, The Real Taiwan gets the most spam out of any site I have, so I was going through recently and wanted to share different types of spam I am receiving.
Why do people target comments for spam?
There are three things I can see right away. One, they are trying to build up backlinks to boost their websites ratings in Google and other search engines. If the comment makes it to the site, and the site doesn’t have nofollow comments, then they will get a link that way and earn valuable Page Ranking (PR). Second, if it is a nofollow site, and the comment makes it through, then they still get a link in your comments that may be clicked on and generate traffic for their site, which in turn would make the site stronger. Third, it is easy because they have robots (bots) doing the work for them, meaning it is automated. they sit back and can watch the links come in. Of course this is black hat and not a nice thing to do. I think the profit margin on these drugs must be so high, that even one sale could be profitable. Yes, I think people do buy these things online.
Here is one type, and these are usually for drugs like viagara, ephedra, tramadol or an ever growing list of drugs I don’t know, care about, or have any clue what function they have. I do know what viagara does though…;)
What is tramadol used for. Tramadol no prescription. Tramadol….
Here is another one, from a realted website, and it is what I call a quality spam comment, meaing it looks like they actually read the site. If there weren’t so many caught up in Akismet, or if they didn’t have a few little errors I would let them go. Here is an example:
Greetings from an English teacher! I came across your blog posting after searching for tefl course and your post on in Taiwan: Taiwan Behind in English Proficiency makes an interesting read. Thanks for sharing. I will search online more next Tuesday when I have the day off.
The thing about this post is they used a post title in the comment, but they forgot the first word of the post which is English. The real title is English in Taiwan: Taiwan Behind in English Proficiency.
Their site is a PR5, and they are resorting to these techniques. They have 24,800 pages indexed in Google. The obvious question is, if they did this to get the site PR that high, then why hasn’t Google or another search engine found out about it and cut them out?
Here is another spam from them:
Hello, I came across your blog posting after searching for taiwan and your post on of TRT, friends links page, Taiwan Blogs makes an interesting read. Thanks for sharing. I will search online more next Tuesday when I have the day off.
Again, they made a post and left the first word of the title out. They also picked a page with only links on it, so it isn’t interesting to read at all… What exactly will they search for too?.. haha. Probably more sites to spam.
I couldn’t help myself and wrote them an email. Now, I didn’t report them, but I want to. I wonder if they will respond. Here is the email:
Hello,
I have reported your site to the major search engines for engaging in the black hat practice of comment spamming. I would recommend that you immediately stop this practice as it only serves to make your site look bad and when the search engines find out what you are doing, they will penalize your site.
~
John
Google Analyticator
Google Analyticator is a sweet WordPress plugin that will help you get your WordPress website set up so it can have all of its pages monitored by Google Analytics. Google Analytics is one of the best (and free) stats programs you can use. Really, I believe this. I also believe if you love stats like I do, you should have a few different programs running together. Then you can make an assessment based on that.
OK, first things first, get an account with Google Analytics (I was put on a waiting list, but eventually they emailed me saying I could join). Without this, the plugin is useless. So you get an account, login, then add your website (s). remember, each website will have a different code and needs to have a plugin installed on every one of your sites.
This will earn you a chunk of javascript code to put in your header. You will extract the part of code starting with UA-XXXXXX-XX and, With the Google Analyticator WordPress plugin, under the options tab inside your WordPress, under Google Analyticator, just add your unique code. enable the plugin and you are off. You will need to wait a while for any data, so check back in tomorrow and see what it says. You may find out some useful info!
Hidden Affiliate Links
My first commenter and new friend from Patchlog has developed a plugin that I have been testing out. It all started after my post about changing the way the URL looks for your referral and affiliate links (while maintaining the link). I used it and it accomplished the same end as my way, but his plugin makes it easier.
Give it a try if you like. At this point, it seems like he is fired up about making upgrades which is great. The only problem I saw with that is that you need to delete a table to upgrade it. TBH, when I see that I think of A) it is work and B) I will nuke my site!. Yeah, I am all about out of the box chemically preserved goodness, like a nice Twinkie. So, at this point, I won’t be upgrading the plugin, and I will likely be experimenting more with it. I am confident he will make this plugin extremely useful.
Subscribe To Comments
Subscribe to comments is a WordPress plugin that is very useful if you have a nice readership base that likes to comment. A community if you will. Of course, that is one of the goals I have of this site. I will make a list of the goals I set soon, and then blog about the steps I take to achieve them. Please do comment on them. I am hoping to be receiving 50 comments a day within 6 months. So, how can you make your commenters happier?
Give them the option to click a box that subscribes them to receive emails when someone else has written another comment on the same post. You avoid the hassle of having to go back periodically and check up on the site to see if someone has answered you question, or even just responded to your idea.
You can download Subscribe to Comments here
As you can see, I have installed the code for it under my comment box. If you read through the author’s post, it should be clear what you should do. If you have a question, I will help you out.
This post was inspired by my first commenter, from Patchlog. I have given him a permanent link in my footer for doing that. It may not be much now, but when this site is successful it will be a nice treat for him. Next post is about his WordPress plugin.
Cheers,
John
My Blog Log
I have signed up with a new service as you can see by the newest addition to the sidebar. My Blog Log allows you to check out my reader community. Some people even upload pictures and it has a more personal feeling about the visitors to the site. I don’t have many visitors now, but I will, and it will be nice to know who my peers are.
Viral Tool
I have been checking out articles in the Blog Rush box on this site. Interesting stuff. I found this one site that was marketing a viral tool, and the site was very, very new, meaning it didn’t have many backlinks and no Google PR or Alexa ranking. Here was what the article said:
Here is first Viral Tool to bring more traffics to your blog. Best and it’s 100% FREE and automatic. You set it up once and let it do it’s job by itself!
I will link to them, and maybe they can leave a post about what they are up to. Link is here.
That was basically all it said. It had a download here link, and as the code you need to type in to drop a comment was P-R-A-Y. I saw that and how cheezy the site looked and was like – who in their right mind is going to download this viral tool. The product has no writeup, and just reeks of a virus or spyware installation. What does the viral tool do? Let me know if you install it. 
Second helping of Spam
I got my second spam today. The dam is starting to crack. The only thing is, it was identical to the first. hahaha….
Writing Code in a Post with Postable
Both of the plugins that I tried didn’t work properly for me for some reason, and me being a little impatient, have decided not to ask them for help. It would take too long (perhaps an eternity, as plugin writers are barraged with requests for help).
I used this page, which is called Postable. Enter the code you want to add and then hit “make it friendly”. It will add the proper characters to the code to make in not execute in your blog (hopefully anyway!). So, I have deleted those plugins from my plugin directory and used this site. I will use it more in the future I am sure!
Change Referral Affiliate Link URL
People are growing more savvy to the ways of the Internet, and many people don’t like being sold things, and especially if it means that you are going to get a cut of some of the pie. You can see when you put your cursor over a link if it has a referral id or affiliate ID in it. Some affiliate id’s are just for credits or some other non monetary arrangement, but others can mean lots of money, and there are blogs out there that make loads of money off of their referral links. You will notice that they hide them somehow.
I installed a plugin that allows me to add code to the post because of this. Here is how you can change your affiliate URL so people won’t as easily know you are getting some kind of benefit from their actions.
Steps:
1. Make a folder in your site’s root directory. Call it something harmless.
2. Make a php file with this code in it <? header("Location: http://www.blogrush.com/r64401862"); ?> don’t forget to change the URL.
3. Save the file as something.php
4. Upload the file to the folder you made
5. Set the referral links to your folder, ie www.yoursite.com/newfolder/newreferrallink.php
Google Code Prettify for WordPress
Google Code Prettify for WordPress is my second choice to put code snippets in the website so the guests of this website can see the code without the code bombing my site.
Instructions: Go to the site linked to above, then download, install, and activate the plugin on your site. Should be doen then. Here is the code you will need to use to surround the code snippets in your posts:
****************************Update********************************
This plugin didn’t work properly wither. Oh well. Maybe it was because I use WordPress 2.2, or maybe it is because my theme, or maybe….. Back to the drawing board….
code here
Dean’s Code Highlighter v1.2
Dean’s Code Highlighter is a WordPress plugin that allows you to write code inside of your posts so that doesn’t get treated as code, you dig?
It is useful for people that want to show other people what code to use to execute functions, without bombing their websites. As such, I have installed this and will see how well it works for me. I will need to add some code to the next post.
Download the plugin from the link above, upload it to your plugin folder and then activate it in the plugins tab inside WordPress.
****Woah, while I tried to install this, it told me it couldn’t install it because it triggered a fatal error. I don’t know why, but perhaps a conflict between plugins or non compatibility with WordPress 2.2. So, I have a few options. First, go to the plugin author and search the forum or comments in the hopes of finding a quick fix. I could also ask try to contact him and ask for a fix, or I could go and search for a different plugin. I will opt first for the latter.
Blog Rush
I was cruising through the Digital Point Forums (where I have nearly completed 7 days of membership, and just realized they don’t allow images in the signature, which is rotten considering I spent a lot of time with the cool post2pic plugin last night), and saw a thread about Blog Rush. I am not a part of any social group, and this one has the potential to drive a lot of traffic to the site so I figured what the heck, I am willing to try new ways of getting traffic to my sites. It doesn’t seem like it should affect Google Adsense at all, but if Google does come out against this for any reason I will shut it down ASAP. I am not interested in any Black Hat ways of driving traffic. Call me a bit old fashioned maybe, but I just want to run a clean and honest website (hahah – old fashioned and website in the same sentence…)
If you notice, there is a referral number within the code. I think that the more people you refer, the more times your content may be seen or something along those lines. So, if you want to join up, feel free to do so through here and help get this website on its feet. If not, then just type in blogrush.com in your browser and you’ll be on your way.
Here is the code with a different URL – Blog Rush -, one that isn’t as easy to notice the referral link, and I will spaek to why that is important later and how I did it too.
I will report back to the stats from this. Hopefully it will help you make your decision about joining easier.
Directories
Here is the first time I have tried to enter my blog into a directory of blogs. Wish me luck, The name of the directory is Blog Listings. They like to have a reciprocal link back. I don;t know how bad this is, as it is free.
My First Spam!
Spam is usually not a reason to celebrate, but your first is always a little emotional. It means you have grown up a bit. This site won’t be the same from this moment on. Here is a copy of the spam, which was advertising a black hat way of spamming comments for back links. I will memorialize my first spam for eternity, or until my server crashes whichever comes first.
The spam’s content:
This comment was posted automatically using Blog Comment Poster software. Would you like to make serious money in this way of advertising too? So start today!
LastPosts2pic
LastPosts2pic is a cool plugin that does a little more than the Feedburner code I just made in the previous post. If you notice, it links to the feed. This plugin creates an animated GIF that links directly to your site, and you can change the amount of previous posts that are listed, so it is even more useful in my opinion. I may use both, but the feedburner one will be much smaller (or not even there). You can download the Last Post 2 Pic WordPress plugin here. Warning it is in German, but it is standard as far as installation and is English in the option panel. Enjoy this one!
Here is a sample of what your pic can look like. I will likely change it after I get access to adding it to my signature in the digital points forum I entered 6 days ago. I don’t want it to be condescending. The forum is loaded with many advanced and novice users, so I don’t want to seem like a Mr Know-it-all.
Nofollow Tag, Comment Spam
One of the biggest nuisances is spam on blogs. I use Aksimet for WordPress blogs, the free service that only requires your API key. I used a program called SPam Karma2 before and it was decent too, but I figured since I have been changing things around, I would change that too. You can see in the sidebar how many spams that have been eaten by Aksimet so far. Wow, as of now, it is 0!. One of my other site gets loads of spams everyday, and had over 4,000 in just about a year. Seems like a lot, and sometimes the real comment slip through as spam.. that is too bad. So why are they spamming?
Bots, or robots, post comments for products like Viagara and Cialis in order to get some backlinks, via comments from your site. WordPress uses the Nofollow code in the comments section which means that you can still get to the other site via the link, but you there is no credit for the site that made the comment. The better the site giving you the link, the bigger the high five Google gives you so if there is a Nofollow tag, Google leaves the commenter hanging but you can still get there with the link. Aksimet prevents the comment from being posted.
