Web 2.0 Blog

Like this blog, I’ve noticed a growing trend of bloggers removing the rel=”nofollow” attribute from their blogs which essentially encourages users to comment on posts without loosing what might be a valuable link to their own site. However, as some people including myself have found out, this drasticallyincreases the level of spam following each of your posts. At first I accepted this and simply deleted them from my moderation panel before they were allowed to be set live, but after a while this became a very drawn-out and exhausting process.

The answer is definately an anti-spam challenge that each user must complete before submitting a comment. The challenegs are usually so simple that a monkey could answer them, but not a robot. The one I use is called Math Comment Spam Protectionand has worked a treat since adding to my comment form.

Download here: MathCommentSpamProtection.zip

Once up and running, I also reccommend adding one fo these U Comment, I Follow Icons to your blog to let people know instantly that your blog is nofollow-free, this will surely encourage interactivity among readers. It’s also treated as a ‘badge of honour’ among bloggers who believe users should be rewarded with at least a decent link for contributing quality comments to a post. That’s how I see it anyway.

If you’re interested in optimizing your blog, you can make it much easier for search engines to crawl by adding a sitemap written on an XML page. The standard way of doing this involves creating a static XML page by taking a snapshot of your site at one time. However, the Google XML Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress will create an excellent quality sitemap for you which dynamically and automatically updates whenever new pages or posts are added to your blog.

Take a look at mine: http://www.adammoss.co.uk/sitemap.xml

It is downloadable as a simple plugin which just requires activation and submission from the Wordpress dashboard area. It results in a clean-looking, well presented and anchored list of your pages, with additional details of when it was last updated. Once installed you don’t need to do anything. It really is a must-have plugin for any serious blogger out there who wants respectable search rankings, so it comes highly recommended from me.

Download the plugin here: Download Plugin

I happy to announce that this blog is now free of any nofollow comands that used to prevent Google and other search engines from influencing the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. This meant every comment prior to this was effected and potentially worthless as a link. This won’t encourage spam though as I’ll still remove anything which I don’t like.

You can find out more about the DoFollow plugin for your blog or download it directly here:

sem-dofollow (zip)