Rubriik: SEO

It is correct that ‘Akismet’ filter out comments and put them in spam folder but if you have analyzed them closely you will notice that most of the time it put some “Genuine Comments” into spam folder.

So If you are getting 500 spam comments daily and you are using ‘Akismet’ then you have to go through your each spam comment once before deleting to check whether it’s a “Genuine comment” from your reader or not.

Recently one of my fellow bloggers informed me about it, “He said that whenever I comment on his blog, it went into spam folder”.

In my opinion ‘Akismet’ is just putting spam comment (with some genuine valid comments) into spam folder, it is not stopping spam comments to be enter in your blog.

I am not against using ‘captcha’ plugin to reduce spam comment but it has two draw backs.

1. It’s a plugin with image processing so it increase the load time of your page.
2. User find filling ‘captcha’ more irritating job (they prefer not to comment most of the time).

Tricks to stop Spam Comments

I have done some analysis on how spammer put comments on your blog. Most of the spam comment that ‘Akismet’ put into spam folder came from Auto Spam software or scripts.

You can see this easily that same comment from different keyword and different IP address in your spam folder.

A spammer usually access your wp-comments-post.php file directly to put comments and it has been observed that most spammer’s doesn’t have any referral value in HTTP_REFERER.

You can easily catch such spammer by putting below code into your ‘.htaccess’ file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post.php*

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomain.com.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$

RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

Note:

1. Before making any change take the backup of your ‘.htaccess’ file.
2. In above code ‘yourdomain.com’ must be replaced with your own domain name.

Above code just check that whether any request to ‘wp-comments-post.php’ file is having value in ‘HTTP_REFERER’ or not. If it doesn’t have any value then it won’t allow to access file.

I have implemented the above code on my blog around 10 days back (from the date of publishing this article) and it has reduced the spam count around 95% (5% are manual spam).

It is not stopping any of reader to make comment manually. It is not stopping any other search engine bot to access my pages for crawling (No issue reported in webmaster tool). So the above method is 100% tested and safe to use.

I know that still there are ways that spammer can use to put spam comments, but it is really easy to find one valid comment among 10 spam comment instead of finding one valid comment among 100 spam comment.

Setting Your Tags, Category and Archive Pages To Display Excerpts

Except for the home page where some people prefer to display the entire content of their recent post and post page where you have no option other than to display the entire post, other parts of the blogs such as tags, archive, author and category pages can be made to display the excerpts all you have to do change this is by looking in to the specific template file and change the code

This

To This

That’s how easy wordpress has made things for us.
Using noindex and nofollow tags

Before we proceed any further I want to clear your heads a bit about nofollow tag, many people think that nofollow links are of no use and search bots do not look in to it. This is a wrong assumption, search engines do crawl through nofollow links as well and index pages, but adding nofollow tag is just to instruct the Google bot not add any pagerank value or authority to the links, thus making it less valuable in terms of SEO, noindex tag on the other hand prevents indexing of specific page or category or any part of the blog or entire blog as a whole making it more powerful.

In order to instruct search engines only to index the contents in your home page and exact post page and not the other replicas found elsewhere in the blog use the following code in your header.php

This code instructs the googlebot and msn bot to follow links present in the homepage and exact post page but do not index them if the contents are not in blog index or post page. You can replace the follow tag to nofollow if you do not want the links to be followed which is a personal preference.

Also there are people who like to have their tags and archive pages to be indexed as well for some specific reasons. Its totally up to you whether you want contents on the other pages not to be indexed or to be.

All the popular search engines we know of like Google, Yahoo and Bing etc fall in to this category as they take on the majority of search market share. These search engines as we know works by indexing or mapping the entire web in a way so that they can be easily accessed by its users. You should also know that majority of the users for these search engines are people living and US and Europe although its widely becoming popular on other parts of the world as well.

Search engines which are less known or less common among the people fall in to the category, I can say search engine like ask.com fall in to this category. Although ask.com is a very good search engine to use and works almost the same way as the search engines which belong to the first category they just cannot compete with the big players in the industry. Why not try ask.com for few days? you may well like it who knows! You should know that you don’t want to be spending much for optimizing your sites for these type of search engines as they don’t really convert well for the simple reason “They don’t have enough user base like big players”

It should be really interesting for you to know the fact that Google is not really the most popular search engine across the globe, there are some exceptions. There are places where people prefer to use their regional search engines to find what they look for around their place. Here are few examples of regional search engines.

There are many search engines which really focuses on certain distinct topic like sports, music, fashion etc.. and these search engines does have a decent amount of user base who are really interested on the topic. Here are few search engines of that kind.

These type of search engines use specially designed spiders and bots which crawls the web to find and index pages. These bots are totally automated and doesn’t have any human interruption. Google, Yahoo and Bing from Microsoft use the exact same method.

Hybrid search engines are something which include variety of search results on their webpage. Google is a very good example for this kind of search engine. Let do a simple search in Google for the term “seo your blog” and see what do we come up with.

As you can see that there are variety of results for the search term, you do have an organic results, also results on the video and then on the right end you have sponsored listing which belongs to adwords program from Google.

Hybrid search engines does a very good job of mixing various search results and provide it to their users.

If you are an user of multiple search engines then you might have probably noticed that different search engines produce different results for the same search term, this mainly due to the difference in their algorithms and difference in the metric systems they use in order to rank pages. So what are meta search engines?

Meta search engines take the search results of many popular search engine, put them together and generate a new set of results that is based on the results of all these search engines thus really improving the quality of search results, they are also very good in getting you the page which you are really looking for.

http://dogpile.com is a very good example for meta-search engine.