Oooh, I’m now getting between ten and twenty spam comments a day. They’re all obviously from the same source but all for different sites, from different names and different IP addresses. They still all have a very obvious form and content so the spam filter in Wordpress is catching them. One final odd part, they’re all on the same post too…
I’ve finally fixed the template. I didn’t realise that the damn thing was switching background images depending on whether this was a single post or not (I added the sidebar to all pages you see).
Quite old by now but still amazing to see: a reasonably long blog post in which every single word links to a different blog. Quite an achievement. Jeff Blanco
There are quite a few marketplace-type sites out there facilitating text link trading. I don’t mean link exchanges, I mean buying and selling text links.
I’ve read a few reports of high profile sites having their PageRank-passing-on-ability removed by Google because of this, but for the most part it’s probably safe. The main reason being so many sites are doing it that the skew caused by removing those sites could well be bigger than the skew caused by leaving them in. On the other hand, it may not be that much of a problem. Although it is a very suspect argument, you could say that a site willing to pay that much (and we’re talking upwards of $15 per month per link) must have something to offer.
At the moment it doesn’t always work like that since many sites are some sort of affiliate adding no new content or are domain-parking-like sites. People are becoming aware of these things though (it’s easy to spot such pages in Google’s own sponsored sites section of search results) and as such more useful sites are actually using this as a valid advertising source.
If you’re interested you might try Text Link Brokers or Linkworth. Linkworth have lots of little tools people can use without actually buying or selling any links and have no minimum PR, and are more open. Text Link Brokers have been at it for longer and have more high PR sites (some PR 8 sites with .gov back-links).
I guess every blog owner posts an entry like this sooner or later. I just had my first serious bout of comment spam. About 50 or so pointless messages about mortgages and refinancing. But since the spammer used the same IP it was really easy to delete them all using Wordpress. Of course other blog software probably has the same features…
I rarely mention other blog posts, but this one caught my attention:
The quote that I specifically liked was: “A kid that dies from a bad case of diarrhea in the third world would pleasure 60 year-olds with heart disease for the chance to become a 60 year-old with heart disease getting pleasured by a young boy.”
An image ad for Adventure Quest (an RPG) keeps appearing at the top of my blog in the Google spot. But, it doesn’t show the “Ads by Google” link. It also has a little cross in the top right hand corner that makes the ad disappear…
I found a site a while ago that was willing to pay for text links on your site. The wanted them not because they thought they’d get more direct traffic but because they’d get an increase in PageRank.
It’s quite a popular idea these days with a few sites offering text link brokering services. You pay them and they get several high PR sites to link to you. Doesn’t matter if the sites content don’t match, just that Google finds the link. I never had a site with a high enough PageRank until now to actually join. Now I do, I thought I’d give it a spin; I joined Text Link Brokers.
A quick search on Google revealed little information (lots of question on forums with no answers). There was one negative comment but it was apparently about one of the competitors instead that has a very similar name. Anyway a couple of days after signing up I was told I need to reduce the number of external links since they only allow 20 in total and want to be responsible for five of them (that’s why I now have a bit at the bottom of the page counting external links). After sorting that out they sent an email for the rates they are willing to pay. And they’re pretty good. Not marvelous but they don’t actually require people to click like Adsense ads do.
The one problem is I now have to wait for someone to actually buy links.
I spend a couple of days away from the internet and things happen!
Google now allow you to split a page into sections with the idea that Adsense ads are only targetted to the text in that section. A couple of comments is all you need: <! -- google_ad_section_start --> <! -- google_ad_section_end -->
Apparently Google only take this as a suggestion but in some situations it could help. Of course sticking to one topic per page is better nearly all the time anyway.
I decided if Ryan is going to post more often there needs to be an easier way to tell our posts apart, so I decided to fiddle around with the theme a bit. Basically all I did was put a div tag around all the posts setting the class to the author of the post and then added style information for .Ryan and .Oliver. I also changed the top header slightly too.