Smarter Spammers

Smarter spam will not be so blatant and attempt to mimmick a genuine comment. This is actually quite easy to do – a generic post along the lines of “Thanks, that’s really useful” would probably sound genuine on the majority of informative posts and if the post doesn’t contain any links then why suspect such a comment? The give away is the commentor’s url, assuming your comment system allows the commentor to add their url (and in particular without rel=”nofollow” on the link) arguably the spammer’s goal has been accomplished – a cheap link back to their site. Even with specific keyword link text, a link on a page relevant to the spammers desired keywords will be a good catch.

How To Stop It

If you are maintaining a single isolated blog, then you may not have a means of picking up on comments like this. Visiting the websites of the commentors can certainly help weed out the obvious offenders, though arguably this is a for of referer spam – getting you to visit the site!

If you maintain a number of sites, then you can spot this sublte breed of comment spam, for example just today I received 2 identical comments to 2 completely unrelated blogs linking to wahoo.com. Furthermore the blogs weren’t english language sites either, so an english comment is a dead give away.

One action that one can take is to make sure you’re using a third party comment spam tool, such as akismet and mark the comments as spam.

I’ve chosen to go a step further and mention that wahoo.com has comment spammed several of the sites I maintain – surprisingly a seemingly legitimate enterprise, not some cheap viagra selling outfit! I wonder if this is the work of a dodgy SEO outfit…

The post Wahoo Comment Spam appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

The key problems are duplicate content and sub optimal page titles. There are probably a plethora of other articles going in to great detail on this very subject and no doubt a good many plugins, but I just wanted to knock up a quite list so I could keep a note of the key steps and blindly apply them on other installations later on.

Improve Page Titles

We want the page title to be the title of the post, edit header.php and change the title tag as follows:
<title><?php if ( is_home() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo(' — '); bloginfo('description'); } else wp_title('',true); ?>%lt;/title>

Fix Duplicate Content

Insert the follow code in header.php after the title tag – this stops robots indexing the pages where your posts are duplicated:

<?php if((is_home() && ($paged > 2 )) || is_date() || is_category()) {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noarchive" />';
} ?>

Improve Permalink Structure

Ultimately, we want to have the page urls for each post as http://www.blogname.com/seo-friendly-post-title/.

1. Login
2. Go to Options
3. Then click on Permalinks
4. Change the format to ‘Custom’ with the following format
   /%postname%/
5. Submit

You can also use post slugs to manually tweak the url. E.g. You might want to change:
http://www.blogname.com/really-long-and-diluted-post-title/
http://www.blogname.com/cool-title/

Simply edit the post slug when you are writing a post.

Redirect Canonical To Urls

Your site should be on www.blogname.com or blogname.com – not both.
If your hosting supports it (and is apache based), you can edit your .htaccess file to set up a redirect. Assuming you want www.blogname.com (rather than blogname.com) add the following lines to your .htaccess file in your wordpress dir:


RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.blogname.com [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.blogname.com/$1 [R=301,L]

NB If you aren’t using url rewriting yet, you should add the following line aswell to enable URL rewriting:
RewriteEngine On

Stop Robots indexing your feeds and other unwanted pages

You can tell the robots (search engine spiders) not to index certain pages, edit your robots.txt filre to include the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /rss
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$

NBIf your blog is in a subdirectory, prefix the above with the blog directory name, e.g.
/rss => /blog/rss

Install the blog in the top directory or on a subdomain

Optimally your blog is on it’s own domain, so www.blogname.com goes straight to your blog, and it’s not installed in a subdirectory like www.blogname.com/blog. When you install wordpress, be sure to move the extracted files out of the extracted directory and into the top directory of your site.

Alternatively set up a subdomain for your blog e.g. blog.mywebsite.com.

Helpful Plugins and Themes

The K2 extension TripleK theme is used by this site, and automatically applies some of the above fixes.

I’ll add some more ideas some!

Referneces

• Webmaster World Discussions http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3084893.htm >http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3097706.htm

The post WordPress SEO cheat sheet appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

The Solution
Don’t use wordpress 2.2 – you’ll have to stick with 2.1 for TripleK theme

The comments on http://www.johntp.com/2007/02/08/triplek2-093/
were closed, so I’ve added the comment here!

The post Cannot redeclare register_sidebar() TripleK appeared first on Mr Kirkland.