Search Engine Optimization Blog - SEM News & Opinion - David Ogletree » blogging

I’m a little tired of everybody having a premium section

ogletree — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:18:46 +0000

I was just over at www.searchengineland.com and 2 pages into reading article titles they tell me I got to pay to read more. On twitter I saw that www.jensense.com has a “Pro” section. www.seobook.com, www.seomoz.com, www.webmasterworld.com, www.shoemoney.com and I’m sure there are others all have premium sections. I miss the old days when everybody talked online and you did not have to pay them extra. These people are all now very rich because they gave great advice online. Now that they are all famous they want to make an extra buck. They get lots of business from giving away information in the past and now they just rest on that fame and charge for their information. They don’t have to prove that they are smart any more so they want to charge us for it.
Another thing that has happened is that the forums suck now that everybody has their own website. You used to be able to go to one or two forums and talk with everybody now you have to go visit 20 websites to talk to the same people. At least everybody is getting on twitter but you don’t get discussions like you did on the forums.

Reciprocal Website Reviews

ogletree — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:15:00 +0000

I new website called Review Back has launched that allows people to swap reviews. They are releasing it into Beta today. It is designed to be an alternative to ReviewMe and other Pay Per post sites. I think it is a good idea. Just make sure you trade links with people in the same area you are in. It does not have to be a competitor. It can be a site that offers something in the same area but a different vertical than you do.

By the way this is not a traded review. I just did this on my own.

Robots.txt for WordPress blog

ogletree — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:00:30 +0000

There is a nice plugin that help you do “noindex, nofollow” to certain pages to remove lots of duplicate content. These plug ins don’t cover pages that are not in WordPress. Here is an example WordPress robots.txt.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /comments/

I went from 100 pages in the supplemental to 9. This is not for all blogs. Some blogs have different URL’s. Check your supplemental index by typing

site:domain.com –view ***

This will show the pages you have in the supplemental index.

Add flickr photos to mybloglog profile

ogletree — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:58:58 +0000

I was just at www.mybloglog.com and noticed that I have the option to add my flickr photos to the picture section of my profile.

Technorati Tags: mybloglog, flickr, pictures, profile

Plugin: WordPress Duplicate Content Cure

ogletree — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:11:09 +0000

Update: 3-04-07

You can change line 24 in the plugin from:

if((is_single() || is_page() || is_home()) && (!is_paged())){

to

if((is_single() || is_category() || is_page() || is_home()) && (!is_paged())){

and that will put your category pages in Google. This plugin is very simple and can be modified very easily.

I just installed the WordPress Duplicate Content Cure. WordPress creates lots of different pages that are very similar or completely the same. What it does is put a “noindex,follow” tag on these pages.

Be carefull with this plugin it can hurt your rankings. It is very common for a blog to rank for category pages. This plugin will remove all pages other than the ones you create. It will remove the category pages from google. Category pages rank well in Google because you end up with a pretty high keyword density and the internal linking. I am not recommending this plugin just testing it out. I may end up making some changes to it. I think it is a good idea just knocks out a bit too much.

Why do top SEO bloggers use rel=”nofollow”

ogletree — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 17:05:52 +0000

I spoke about the rel=”nofollow” tag a while back and thought I would talk about other bloggers using it. Many SEO blogs are still using rel=”nofollow”. I understand why Matt Cutts uses it. He works for the company that is trying to convince bloggers Google is trying to do something for them. But why are all the major SEO’s using it. They either use it or flat out don’t allow url’s or have some fancy redirect to do the same thing. Some even have posts about how stupid and useless nofloow is. rel=”nofollow” is not the solution. What they need to do is install proper spam detection like spamkarma and there are many good CAPTCHA programs out there. I know many of these people and they all to this day complain about comment spam. SEOMoz even made a big deal about how they use rel=”nofollow” because some of their commenter’s were linking to bad sites. It is funny that all they were worried about was what Google thought of them linking to these bad sites and not their readers. We still have to see these bad links. Obviously the rel=”nofollow” has not helped them at all. It is very simple to take off of your blog. There are at least 2 plugins that work great for wordpress. (plugin1, plugin2) If you guys are reading this please install one of these.

Here is a list of people that still show rel=”nofollow” or some other method to not link to people like redirects. The ones with *’s are the ones that have spoken out against rel=”nofollow”. Not all of these are SEO blogs some are blog written by SEO’s on some other subject.

www.seobook.com
www.jimwestergren.com
www.seomoz.org
www.seobythesea.com
www.seologs.com
www.webguerrilla.com
www.jensense.com
daggle.com
www.wolf-howl.com *
www.seroundtable.com
www.ewhisper.net
www.oilman.ca *
www.davidnaylor.co.uk
www.goodroi.com
www.stuntdubl.com
searchengineland.com

This is not a comprehensive list.

State of the Blog – Update on how my blog is set up

ogletree — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:51:39 +0000

I have made a lot of changes to my blog lately and I wanted to update some of the things I have done to protect my blog and things I have done to improve it. The most important thing I did was update to wordpress 2.0.7. After what happened to Graywolf I thought it was best to keep on top of wordpress updates. I noticed the other day that somebody came to my site with the term

spam karma + blog’s + name (required) + Website + comments + search engine optimization

That kind of scared me. So what I did was take that spam karma footer off then I replaced all those other terms with pictures. I used the same technique I use to make my email a picture. I realized that those terms are on every wordpress blog. (by the way that is a nice way to find blogs to comment on). You could also just change the wording on the wordpress default text like: pages, archives, categories, search, blogroll, sites, meta to something else. A lot of spammers use these to search in Google and other places to find blogs to spam on.

One of the things about wordpress or wordpress themes is the way it handles page titles. I have seen some plugins that handle this but I was not happy with any of them so I just went in and hacked it myself. I went to the header.php file for my template and found:

and replaced it with:

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == "/"){
bloginfo('name');
}else{
wp_title('');
}
?>

There are a bunch of ways to do this. The main thing to know here is that putting the quotes in wp_title removes that weird >> thing. There are also som build in conditional statements for wordpress. is_home() returns true when you are on the home page or is_single() which returns true when any single Post page is being displayed. There are a lot more is_ conditional tags listed here if you want to read up on it.

Of course there is always the list of plugins I use:

Adsense-Deluxe – that lets me add Adsense to specific pages with specific code. I don’t put adsense on all my posts and this lets me be very specific. Sometimes you will find yourself ranking for some unexpected terms. This is a good way to monitize it without putting Adsense all over your stie.

Anti Spam Image – This plugin inserts a security image for the WP comment page, requiring the poster to enter the right characters in the image. The link is to the plugin on my site. The site that I got it from seems to be down.

Bsuite – Stats program. It shows you how many visitors you have for the day, referrers, comments left, and search engine traffic. It also gives a nice traffic graph on the bottom. It is very simple and I’m sure there is much better but I have gotten used to it. The download for this one seems to be broken as well so I just uploaded the one I have.

Digg This – Adds Digg story link on detection on digg referrer. On the rare occasion I get dugg.

Feedburner Feed Replacement – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from. I’m sure everybody already has this one.

Feed List – This lets me have the 2 pages I have that show stuff I dig and stuff I commented on at www.digg.com. Digg provides rss feeds with that data for me.

Google Sitemaps – This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. It also keeps it up to date when you create new posts

Objection! Redirection – Gives you the ability to redirect incoming traffic based on pattern matching. I use this because I moved my blog from another format a while back.

Spam Karma 2 – Spam killer. It works very nice. I turned off the built in CAPTCHA FOR it because it went to a blank page after you typed in your code and I already had something that used CAPTCHA. This has stopped most spam. The only spam I get is stuff that really looks like a comment and I have to make a judgement call on. It is rare somebody is working hard to hand enter spam that is hard to detect so is not a big deal.

WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

WP-Cron – I only use this with WordPress Database Backup. I have it set up to send me an email with my db backed up in it.

WP-phpMyAdmin – This is a new one that I just added. It is real cool. It adds a tab in my admin panel that gives me full phpmyadmin access to my database. It is so simple to install compared to installing phpmyadmin the normal way plus you have one log in.

Subscribe To Comments – This plugin will allow your readers to get email notifications when comments are left on a post after their own.

Dofollow – The dofollow plugin for WordPress lets you remove the evil nofollow attribute from your comments.

Promote your blog, Places to submit your RSS

ogletree — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:41:21 +0000

I did some searching and found some places to submit my rss feed. It is also a good idea to find people at mybloglog that have sites in your same area and add them to your contacts and join their communities. You will find some great sites you never knew about and also increase your exposure. When I did this I got a big spike in subscribers to my rss feed.

http://www.rss-network.com/submitrss.php

http://www.syndic8.com/suggest.php?Mode=data

http://www.postami.com/rss.finder/submit_feed.php

http://www.2rss.com/index.php

http://w.moreover.com/cgi-local/site/sourcesubmission.pl

http://pingomatic.com/?oldpinger

http://www.newsxs.com/en/sources

http://www.feedsfarm.com/a.html

http://www.rssfeeds.com/suggest_wizzard.php

http://4guysfromrolla.aspin.com/func/addres/rss-review/userlist?rid=1427020&cob=4guysfromrolla

http://www.devasp.com/search/AddRSS.asp

http://www.aspin.com/func/addres/rss-support