2013

Year 2013

How to Deal with Spam Comments.

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no spam!

no spam!

    Here is the story of my blog a few days ago. I had a half dozen of good posts on it and I was feeling like a star blogger as I was getting almost 30 comments every day on each of them. Even though I never saw a significant increase in my page views…But who cares when you get lots of comments on it. I was happy and enjoying blogging, thinking in my mind ‘Wow who gets famous so fast?’ I had all sorts of complementary comments including “You should write a book” “You should participate in top blogs awards” “You have great knowledge about this stuff”….

   However, one noon I stumbled on wordpress forums where somebody had posted that such kind of flattery comments are spam and nothing else. Within seconds, I switched my tab and checked my comments box and found that, all those comments were back linked to some spam sites and ‘offensive content’. I never in my life wanted to be associated with this kind of trash and spam, so without second thoughts I removed all those spam comments. I was pretty disappointed. I truly love blogging but this kind of things really discourages you. So, today I am writing this post for all those beginners like me who are facing the same problem. Let us begin with the ‘Types of Spam comments and how to deal with them’.

·       Offensive Comments: These comments have offensive and annoying words in it. Thank god, I never got them. But if you have do not be disappointed just delete them. Not everybody can talk or behave well, so just neglect these kinds of things. Even the big blogs get such kind of things; it is just that they put them in trash (True place these comments deserve).

·       Flattery comments: Very easy to detect, these comments usually say lots of things about us that we never are. For example (I get these things usually)

“Seems like you know a lots of things about this stuff, you are a pro, I will subscribe to your feeds”

“My friend told me about this website and sure it has lots of interesting stuff, keep it up”

“It looks like you have written a book on it, it’s just like you are reading my mind, cheers”

I stumbled on to thus page and must admit it is really great writing, I will bookmark it and visit again”

…etc…etc.

Seriously guys, I have never have written a book on single damn thing, I am not an X-man mutant to read people’s mind and as far as I am concerned whenever I hang out with my friends we have a lot of things to talk about than to recommend websites to each others…

Do not fall for these comments…Then how to differentiate between genuine and spam comments? Spammers have user names like SEO Tips, Free Party Pills, Online money fast, Click me, etc. and there links leads to spam website or Shopping, selling useless stuff, weird online marking and other trash stuff which you can easily recognize. Also, they do not have profile picture or Gravatar whereas every serious blogger has a profile picture! These kinds of comments are really annoying and troublesome for the visitors at your blog. They also put up a bad impression of your website. So, get rid of them as fast as you can but if you keep on approving them then the spammers will totally concentrate on your website, those comments will keep on pouring making your blog look like a spam station!

·       Concern Comments: These spammers put comments that tell us that something is totally wrong in our website and that they could fix it. Believe me; WordPress never makes your website look bad unless you play with its code. Here are some samples of these concern comments.

“Hey you have got a good website, the colours are good, but I noticed a problem there with IE 8, visit this link it can help you”

“You really have great skills of writing but I can see that it is unable to pull traffic, learn some SEO tips here”

“I like your theme it is really beautiful, did you make it? But, it is having a bug, just want to give you a heads up, the content is going out of the page in chrome”

Google Chrome is one of the best browsers in the world and hardly has any issues and about the traffic, you can pull traffic only by your content and not by some ‘cheap tricks’.

When you see such comments, you just go frenzy check your website’s working with other browsers or report problem to WordPress support. The real problem is the spam comment; browsers hardly interfere with the visuals of your blog unless it is necessary.

·       Short n Nice comments: Really hard to identify but can be detected by their usernames and links. They go like this “Good Job Keep it up” “I loved it, will bookmark and visit again” “Your content is so well written that I could hardly resist myself from commenting”

Why do we comment on some post? Because we tried doing what was written in the post and it did not worked, or we had some issues doing that thing, we have some doubts or we have something to add to that post. If you look carefully to those comments above, they do not resemble to the content of the post in any sense…! This is not some social networking site to put such kind of short comments!

·       Exchange offer comments: “Hey I liked your post and shared it on facebook, pls check mine too” “I feel your blog is quite interesting checkout my blog and tell me about it”

There is only one thing I can say about these comments- Pathetic

·       Links comments: These guys are really brave and put direct links on our blog like we are advertising their blog…Its up to you, if you want to advertise such links go ahead.

   WordPress provides a great plugin called Akismet; it finds spam on its own and puts it in spam box. It is up to you whether to entertain such spammers on your Blog. If you are so keen to put up these comments then you can at least remove the links associated with them (To me that doesn’t make sense as these comments are not added by readers but by softwares…) . Now if a spammer is reading this; Please stop spoiling our content that we write with such a hard work we really love our blog. Putting up such links can bring you one or two bucks but it discourages our interest, which is more valuable. Find a good job!

       If you like, this post ‘like’ it below and let me know how I could have improved it. If you have, a rage (like me) on these spammers then let me known what you think about it by commenting below.( I still get almost 20 to 30 spams daily, but thanks to Akismet and WordPress team).

Recommended WordPress Plugins.

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  WordPress has lakhs of plugins and it quite hard to select few plugins that suite our requirements. There is always a huge competition among the developers at wordpress for their plugins. These plugins when installed on your Blog’s Dashboard will simplify your blogging experience. Here are some of the Plugins that I recommend and are really great… I personally use these plugins and can also be used in WordPress.org. To get these plugins simply click there name and you will be automatically directed to their official page. Alternatively, you can log in to your wordpress.com account, click Plugins and then Add New Plugin, search them and Install them. Make sure you help their developers by donating them, if possible, as they provide you with such a great service free of charge. The first few plugins are related to Social connections and sharing.

1. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget: – It is a sharing plugins (widget) that you can add to the right or left column of your website as perCapture your layout. Is provides lots of social networking options. Also you can see the share count on the side of the button. It is pretty easy for the visitor to just click and share your page or post on whichever social network he likes. The developers have also give a lots of freedom in customization of the box so that it suites your website. You can make it large or small, images and title or just images.

2. Akismet:- Aksimet is a cool plugin to avoid spam comments or some offensive or annoying comments that put you is trouble if posted on website. Whenever a viewer comments on your post this plugin scans it and checks its health, if it is a spam it goes to the spam folder or it is sent for moderation. I f you do not think it is a spam you can ‘unspam’ it by going in that directory. After installation of this plugin you have to visit its official website and registry free or select a plan and get the Akismet activation key at your inbox.

3. All in one Favicon: – For those who do not know what a favicon is, it is a small icon type image, which you see at the top of the tab where the name Capture1of the website is. This is really an all in one favicon plugin. It supports jpg and png format images. All you need to do is to upload the image you want as favicon and blip, you are done!

4. All in One SEO Pack: – Search Engine Optimization is really important for your website. This plugin has everything in it like Google Analytics support, Navigation links, it automatically optimizes the title and the post as per the compatibility of the search engine. It has lots of other feature that will help your SEO.

5. Better WP Security:- It protects your wordpress installation from attackers in short it is like an antivirus.

6. BWP Google XML Sitemaps:- This plugin automatically generates you website site map according to schedule you selected and submits it to Google. This is highly beneficial for your website in terms of SEO. It also creates and submits the sitemap after you publish a post or update it. You don’t have to edit your CSS or have to follow a lengthy process this plugin does everything for us. Google also has its own plugin for sitemap. You can also try that one if you want.

7. Jetpack by WordPress.com:- If you have a WordPress.com account and want to synchronize with your WordPress.org app then this is the plugin you are looking for. I highly recommend you to install this app. This will help your website to go like rocket in terms of traffic because it gives you the access to whole WordPress.com community.

8. Post to Twitter:- Twitter has a great potential to bring a lots of traffic to you blog. Whenever you post something or update your post this plugin sends a tweet with a link to your post to your twitter account. Thus all your followers can read your post the moment you click here publish. Also if you have your twitter account liked to your Facebook fan page then all your friends and followers at Facebook too can read it. So, it is like a Jackpot traffic plugin…!

9. qTranslate:- This plugin translates your posts to other languages for the Capture3convenience of your other viewers. It has a great accuracy although you can try plugins from other developers.

10. Sharebar:- This is an awesome plugin to make your viewers share your posts. It floats at the left side of your post and moves along with it until the end as you scroll down your browsers window. The only problem it has is that it does not give you many options to share. Instead you can try Social Media widget it gives many sharing options and it is customizable.

11. Top Commentators Widget:- This plugin displays the top commentators on your blog column, this encourages the viewers to comment to get on the top position of this list.

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12. Ultimate TinyMCE:- WordPress does not gives a lots of option to customize your post. This plugin replaces the edit post dashboard with its own dashboard with hundreds of option, you don’t have to edit any codes. Highly recommended.

13. The rest plugins you can install are Facebook like box, Twitter follow box, RSS Feeds subscribe box, Google+ button, Email Subscribe box, etc. which can be found at their respective developers. Also I would like you to recommend you to install a Captcha plugin. When a viewer comments on your blog he is asked to use the captcha so as to prove he is a human and not a robot. For live testing of these plugins you can visit my website BASICS SCIENCE. If you have found a good plugin please share your experience with us here at the comment box so that even we can use it.

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5/4/2013

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A graphical depiction of a very simple css doc...

A graphical depiction of a very simple css document (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  Yup… I know I didn’t blogged recently, I was designing the website www.basicsscience.com and so, I was pretty busy doing that stuff. Actually it would have take less time if it was in HTML but off course WordPress is in CSS and I am a unaware of CSS. Now I have to learn this CSS also…I learned a bit enough to change my website’s background color and header and footer…Font Styles,etc. but to monetize it for search engine optimization I have to learn it properly. I have a couple of books on CSS so, I will have to study them there are also tutorials available on internet so I’ll try them.

   In the mean time ahh… I was having second thoughts for Content Management Systems (CMS) Joomla and WordPress but eventually I selected wordpress because it gives you a lots of freedom for designing your website also it has cool plugins and widgets. I have posted first five posts on it and to be frank I have got zero pageviews but it takes time I mean every website needs time to grow (except Facebook) !

  At first I was a bit confused about the length of the posts but then I searched the internet and decided to have an average of 1000 words length. Today officially I will be launching my website even though I sort of made it live on 29th of march but today I will be promoting it and putting it on Social Networking sites…Wish me Luck…!