IT-blogger.dk

At December 6, 2012, Google announced that Google+ is the fastest growing social network ever. It announced that it had more than 500 million users and that 235 million users where active – 135 million users where active just in the stream. But how do you measure a social networks success? Is it by the number of users? Is it by the number of active users? Is it by the time spend on the site?

If you look at how much time users has spent on different social networks, you haven’t yet seen the success of Google+. A statistic that was brought in the Guardian and made by comScore, showed that Google+ is actually falling in the number of minuts that users spent on the site:

 

This statistic actually showed that Pinterest is the most growing Social network right now (measured in time spent on the site) and that Tumblr is the second most growing network. However it seems like the biggest growth of Pinterest is now over.

But if you look on Google+ it is not growing as Google sad – it is falling. So what can Google+ do to increase the time spent on their site? I think that Google+ communities, that Google+ recently released is a major force in winning the social time of the users (By the way, if you search for some good communities to follow – look here). On Google+ communities people can discuss a lot of questions, get help to a lot of issues, discuss articles and news around the web, find followers that has the same interest and market your website. Some of the traffic to regular communities will move from websites to Google+ in the future and then leading to an increase in time spent.

Google has also launched Google Authorship – a link between your website and Google+, which may in the future influence websites place in search engine result pages (SERP). Many websites will therefore link their website to their Google+ profile, and try to interact more on Google+, because it is believed that interacting on Google+ may affect your Author rank – a rank that does not currently influence SERP, but will in the future. Therefore websites will also try to get their visitors to use Google+. So the launch of Google Authorship will lead to a higher time spent, but first when companies and websites all over the world realize that they have to use Google Authorship, and first when Author rank influence SERP (first a lot of test has to be made to ensure that the launch will higher the quality of SERP).

But will Google+ ever attract your personal relations from Facebook and get the private stuff onto Google+ instead of Facebook. Will people ever share their private thoughts on Google+, will they wish people happy birthday on Google+ like on Facebook and will they use Google+ to invite to private parties? As I see it right now, Google+ will not steel a lot of active, private users from Facebook. Not as long as people are happy about Facebook. People doesn’t want more than one personal, social network – they only need and have time to one.

But I think that Google+ will be used for a lot of professional communication and meeting a lot of new people, and not just your personal relations like on Facebook. You will use Google+ for a lot of issues, that you today do on different websites. If a website has a discussion board on their website and a community on Google+, we will see a lot of users moving from the website to the community. You will use Google+ a lot to increase your knowledge.

Do you think that Google+ will steal users from Facebook? Do you think that Google+ will grow in time spent? What do you think Google+ will be used for? Feel free to leave a comment below. And by the way, I would be happy if you would share this post with your personal network and follow me on Google+.

Link building is a strategy used when optimizing your website to search engines (SEO) and to increase the numbers of visitors on your website. Link building is when you get links on other sites than your website, that points to your website. There are two benefits of using link building for your website:

• Creating more links to your website will give your more entrances to your website, and therefore create more visitors for your website.
• Building good links might increase your Google Page rank and lead to a higher place in the search engine result page.

Both of these effects will gain more visitors for your website. So there is no reason, that you shouldn’t use link building.

Google Page rank and links

When you are talking about link building, you should distinguish between good and bad links. To understand this you have to know something about Google Page rank. Google Page rank is a number that Google calculate with a specific algorithm, and that determine the place of your website in the search engine result page.  The reason why Google uses the Page rank, is because they want to give the users of Google the best search result with content of high quality.

The algorithm that is used for calculation of Google Page rank, is very complicated and only Google knows how it is constructed. But there has been a lot of research and guessing on what factors that are a part of the algorithm.

One of the most important factors in the algorithm is in-going links to your website. When you have to understand how these links contribute to Google Page rank, you have to imagine that the Page rank of the site that is linking to you, is divided into peaces corresponding to the number of out-going links on that site. And then each peace is contributing to the Page rank of the site that is linked to, without loss of Page rank on the source site.

If, for instance, a page has page rank 3 and this site links to 3 sites. Then the source sites Page rank is contributing to the 3 destination sites with a part each, that is directly proportional to 1/3 of the source site Page rank of 3.

The conclusion of this is, that if you want to increase your Page rank mostly, you have to get a lot of links from websites with high Page rank and that has few out-going links. It is better to get a link from a Page rank 3 site with few links, than to get a link from a Page rank 10 site with very many links.

When you are doing link building you could therefore distinguish between good and bad links. Good links are from sites with high Page rank and few links and bad links are from sites with low Page rank and many links.

As the picture above illustrates, the source site (SS) is giving some of its Page rank away to each of the destination sites (DS). The part that is giving away is directly proportional to the Page rank of the source site.

Another thing that research seems to have revealed is that the relation between Page rank and the number of in-going links are logarithmic, i.e. it is more difficult to go from a Page rank 9 to 10, than it is going from a Page rank 0 to 1.

You can calculate the Google Page rank of a site using a calculator, i.e. there is one here.

Just like SEO, the link building strategies is changing all the time. That is why I call this article a Link building 2013 review, because link building might not be the same in 2014.

Links from link directories

Link directories are catalogs filled with links. They were very much used in old days, before search robots came. They are still used a little, but today we use search engines that search in indexes, instead of in catalogs.

There are very many link directories out there, but only a few can really be used for link building. The most known and respected link directories are Yahoo and DMOZ. These are link directories that are of very high quality and it is not easy to be included in these directories. Yahoo has a Page rank of 9 and DMOZ has a Page rank of 7.

If you want to use link directories for link building, only use Yahoo, DMOZ and other link directories of very high quality and with a high Page rank, because using the low-quality link directories that are easy to be included in are a wast of time.

Not many people uses link directories any more, so using these for link building will only benefit to your Page rank, not so much to a directly increase in number of visitors.

Forum posts 

Forum posts can be a good way to do link building, but it really don’t give very much to your Page rank, because a forum has many outgoing links.

Forum posts might not give so much to your Page rank, but in many cases, if you write some good posts that attract visitors, this will directly lead to more visitors.

Blog comments

You can also comment on blog posts when you do link building. This way of link building is like forum posts often not something that benefits your Page rank very much, but can give you visitors.

Guest blogging

You can write an article to a guest blog, to do link building. This is a good idea, because you can place a link to your website and in that way both contribute to your Page rank and get visitors.

Go for the guest blogs that has a high page rank, are well respected in the area your write in and that has a high quality of content. If you do this, it will be a very effective way to gain more visitors to your websites.

Social networks

You can market your articles on social sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious. Many people uses social networks so this can give you a lot of visitors that are very targeted to your site.

Using social networks to market your site will become more and more important, so this is definitely something you should do. Especially Google+ should be the social network you focus on, because it can affect your Author rank and we are expecting that Author rank will be a factor in the place of your website in the search engine result page in the future.

Press releases

You can make press releases about your products or other news about your site. These can be done on different Press release sites, i.e. eCommWire. This can also get a link to your site and give more visitors.

Mobile apps

Mobile apps for smartphones and tablets are very popular, so an effective way to get more visitors is to develop an app for your site or to get a link or ad for your site in another app.

Broken link building

A very effective way to do link building is to find broken links, i.e. links that does not exist any more and therefore gives a 404 error – page not found. Then you can write to the owner of the site and tell that you have found a broken link, but that he can replace the link with a link to your site. In this way you can overtake an old, broken link.

Giveaways

Giveaways is when you offer your visitors something good for free. This could be a free gift or a free e-book they can download. Free things always attract people. This is also a very effective way of link building.

The golden rule in link building

The golden rule in link building is: The harder you have to work for your link, the more worth it is.

This was just a few of the channels you can use, if you want to start link building your articles. There are many more ways to do link building, and if you have an idea to a channel you can do link building, please share this in the comments.

Google AdSense is a program from Google, that allows you to show ads on your website and earn money on ads, just like affiliate marketing. The service is for free and it is easy to participate in the program.

Actually, Google AdSense is a link between you, called a Publisher, and the companies that delivers the ads, called the Advertiser. The Advertiser pays Google AdSense an amount to get there ads exposed on different websites and in Google search results, which should give the advertiser leads and sales. Then Google AdSense pays the Publisher to show the ads on there website.

Stick to the rules (AdSense program policies)

AdSense has a program policy that is very strict. The reasons for this is that Google wants to guarantee their advertisers that when someone click on their ads, this will have a high possibility to convert to a sale and that the ads only will be showed on high-quality sides and that the advertiser will not be associated with something they don’t.

Google enforce their program policy completely, so don’t break the rules. Google has very intelligent algorithms to discover if someone break their policy and when that happens they will block your AdSense account immediately and forever. There is a way to appeal their decision, but only VERY FEW succeed doing this. So the conclusion is: don’t break the rules in AdSense Program Policy.

The most important rules in AdSense Program Policy is:

• Don’t click on your own ads.
• Don’t tell your visitors to click on ads.
• Don’t pay for others to click your ads.
• Don’t use click exchange programs.
• Don’t show ads on pornographic websites.
• Don’t show ads on websites containing content that are protected by copyright law.
• Don’t alter the ads code – the ad code must be original.
• Don’t show ads in popups.
• Don’t show ads in e-mails.
• Don’t show other ads, that looks like AdSense ads.

See the whole Google AdSense Program Policy here.

Create a profile

To get Google AdSense, you must have a Google Profile. Then you can go to the Google AdSense website and register your account to Google AdSense.

After you have registered  an account at Google AdSense, your account must be approved initially by Google. This usually don’t take very long time, and you will get a mail in your Gmail when you have been approved.

When you have been initially approved, you must log in to Google AdSense, and place the ad code on your website. This allows Google to crawl to your site and see if you don’t break the rules. If you don’t do this, you will get approved finally (which usually happens after approximately 1-2 days).  But remember, that Google from time to time crawl to your site and see if you break the rules: so don’t break the rules after you have been approved.

When your account has been finally approved, the ads shows up on your website after approximately 2 hours.

Setup payment method and verify account

You can in AdSense setup which payment method you prefer (mostly through bank account). You enter your bank account number and then you have to verify your account. You do this by going to your account after approximately 2 days and look at your transactions. Google has paid you a little deposit and you have to copy the amount of deposit and enter this into AdSense to verify your account.

AdSense is intelligent

Google’s AdSense mechanism is very intelligent and world famously. This is because Google, through a lot of its services and on websites with ads, collects a lot of statistical information about the visitor. Which gender is the visitor? What are they interested in? What websites has they been visiting earlier?  What language do they speak? What have they been searching for earlier? And a lot of more information about the visitor.

Google uses all this information to pick the right ad for your site. The choice will be a combination of which visitor is visiting your site and the content of the particular site. If a visitor, e.g. is visiting a website with AdSense about cars and has earlier been searching for a Ford car, then Google would properly show an ad where you can buy such a car. This is an intelligent mechanism, and always makes sure that the best ad is showed for the visitor.

Show ads on more sites

When you have been approved by AdSense, you can show your ads on any website that obey the Program policy. In this way you can have more websites and show the same ad on all of them. You can also write guest blog posts on some websites and place your AdSense ads there, and then earn the money that your article drives.

The difference between Google AdSense and Affiliate networks

Google AdSense is not the same as affiliate networks. Actually Google also has an affiliate network, that you can use if you are an AdSense member. When you uses ads from Google AdSense, you will get paid when someone clicks your site. When you uses ads from an affiliate network, your could either get paid per click or if the company that the ads leads to sell something.

Estimated earnings and finalized earnings

When someone clicks on your ads, you will see an amount on your AdSense statistic under Estimated earnings. But this is only an estimated earning, because it has to be confirmed by Google and then become finalized earnings. If, e.g. Google finds some invalid clicks on your ads, then these earnings under estimated earnings will not convert to finalized earnings.

When do I get paid?

You get paid monthly, but only when your have earned more than about 100 $ (the precise amount is in AdSense). If you violate with Google’s Program Policy you don’t get paid!

CTR, CPC and Page RPM

CTR stands for Click-through-rate and is a number that measures the success of an advertising. It is defined as the number of clicks on ads divided by the number of times the ads has been showed. If this number gets to big, this could indicate to Google that your are clicking on your own links and then violating there program policy! This is one way Google can detect that you are breaking their rules.

CPC stands for Cost-per-click (is also called PPC or Paid-per-click) and is defined as the amount you have earned divided by the number of clicks. This number shows how much an ad is worth.

Page RPM stands for Page revenue-per-thousand-impressions. Impressions is the number of times the ads has been showed on your website. It is calculated by taking the estimated earnings and divide them by the number of page views, and you then get the number of earnings per page view. This is a number that indicate how good your site is to converting visitors to money.

On December 6, 2012, Google launched Google+ communities, there answer to Facebook groups. These communities gave the opportunity to meet new Google+ users with same interests, share posts and links to targeted users and discuss a lot of issues about the same topic as the community is about.

But there is a big difference in the quality of each communities, differences in the number of members of the community, differences in the activity of the community and how it is controlled by moderators. In this article I will show you my Top 5 list of communities and some of the best posts in the community. Since I mostly work with webmaster related issues, my Top 5 will also be Webmaster related.

1. Google Authorship & Author Rank

This is my favorite Google+ community. It is used for discussing issues about Google Authorship & Author Rank, that is important to establish on your website, if you want to be in the top of Google in the future. The community is really good, you can get answers to almost all problems with authorship, and the answer comes very quickly. The amount of spam posts in the community is not very high. This is simply a high-quality Google+ community.

# members: 654 members (On January 8, 2013)
Activity: very high
Spam content: almost none
# moderators: 7 (93 members/moderator)

Go to the community here.

2. WordPress

There are many WordPress communities on Google+, but this is my favorite. It is easy to get quick help with all your WordPress issues and there is not much content that doesn’t belong there. If you want to increase your knowledge on WordPress, you should be a member of this community.

# members: 1321 members (On January 8, 2013)
Activity: very high
Spam content: almost none
# moderators: 11 (120 members/moderator)

Go to the community here.

3. SEO+ – Search Engine Optimization / Website Design

This is a community where you can share good SEO (Search engine optimization) articles with other, and possible increase your knowledge of SEO, because others share articles with you. You can also use it to discuss a lot of SEO-issues.

# members: 1070 members (On January 8, 2013)
Activity: very high
Spam content: some
# moderators: 1 (1070 members/moderator)

Go to the community here.

4. Social Media Strategy

This is a community for Social media strategies. Here you can share articles about Social media strategies and receive sharing of articles. There are some guidelines you must follow, if you should use this community: there is a zero-tolerances of spam posts.

# members: 5590 members (On January 8, 2013)
Activity: very high
Spam content: none
# moderators: 8 (698 members/moderator)

Go to the community here.

5. Web Developers, Web Designers, Web Coding

This is a very general community for webmasters. It is especially for discussing programming and CMS (Content Management Systems). The community also has a zero-tolerances for spam posts.

# members: 15111 members (On January 8, 2013)
Activity: very high
Spam content: some
# moderators: 5 (3022 members/moderator)

Go to the community here.

This was some of the communities that I am a member of, and will recommend to other users. Do you have some communities that you like and wish to share, then please post them in the comment section.

If you are building a new website for the internet, you need a web server to put your website files on. There are more possibilities, when you need a web server for your files:

• You can have your own webserver where you can put the files. This is a quite expensive solution, and needs a lot of administration. This will only be the solution for big companies.
• You can buy some space on a webserver, called a web hotel or web hosting. This is a cheap solution, and the web hosting company does all the administration of the webserver company for you. This is the solution for most people, e.g. small companies or private persons.
• You can get access to a free web hosting solution. If you choose this solution, you might expect the web hosting company to put ads on your site, the space of the web hotel might be limited to a small amount of Mb, you may not be able to point your own domain towards at and there might be limited control with your site. This is only the solution for you that is a beginner and only wants a simple website or a test site. I will recommend you to choose a web hotel instead, since this is very cheap.

In this article I will focus on the second possibility, where you choose to buy a web hosting solution. This is a very cheap solution, where you can buy a web hotel from approximately 1 $ per month. Often it is a very good idea to buy a domain name together with the web hosting, which can be bought from approximately 10 $ per year.  This means you can get a web hosting solution and a domain name for a cost of approximately 22 $ per year. This is very cheap, and exactly why I don’t recommend you to choose the free web hosting solutions.

But what is important to look for, when you have to choose the right web host? In this article I will show you some of the choices you have to made, when you need to choose between different packages of web hosting.

What programming language?

Generally there are two types of webservers you can choose: some based on ASP suites and some based on PHP suites. An ASP suite uses the programming language ASP.net (or just ASP) and MS SQL, Access or MySQL as database. A PHP suite uses the programming language PHP and MySQL as database. If you have any doubts, choose the PHP suite since this is the most used choice. In most cases the web hosting company lets you convert between ASP suites and PHP suites, if you want to change.

PHP is the most used programming language, since it is open source and free. And it uses the open source database MySQL. Since this is a free solution, the web hosting’s based on PHP will often be most cheap. Beside this, if you want to use a content management system (CMS) then most of these are also based on PHP and MySQL, such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal that are the three most used CMS.

How much web space?

You also have to choose an amount of web space. For most beginning websites, 500 Mb would be enough, but if you want to have many pictures and movies on your website, then you should choose more space. However, it is always better to choose to little web space, since the most web hosting companies lets you convert to more space for free.

How much traffic is supported?

Some time, the amount of traffic to your website is limited. You should only use web hosts that supports unlimited traffic to your site, since it is not very good if your amount of traffic is limited if you have a lot of traffic. This will lead to less customers, so only choose unlimited traffic.

E-mail addresses

Often when you buy a domain name together with your web hotel, you will also get access to a mail server and e-mail addresses that ends with @your-domain.com. With some web hosts, you will only get a limited number of e-mail addresses (e.g. 20 e-mail addresses) and other places you will get unlimited numbers of e-mail addresses.

There are different mail protocols the web host can support, e.g. POP3 where your mail is downloaded down on your computer using an e-mail program (e.g. Microsoft Outlook or Windows Mail) or IMAP3 where your mails will stay hosted on the mail server. The web host often also support webmail access, so you also can check your mails from any computer anywhere.

Sub domains

If you bought a domain together with your web hotel, the web host might also support sub domains, i.e. domain names like anything.your-domain.com. This is a good thing, because you then can make multiple sites on the same domain and web hotel. So you should definitely go for a web hotel that supports creation of sub domains (usually for free)

FTP access

You should always have the ability to access your web hotel from a FTP access, since this is the best and easiest way to transfer a lot of files to your web hotel.

Backup

Some web hosts offers to backup the content of your web hotel reguarly. You should always choose a web hotel that supports backup, since you can easily loose your whole website if you don’t. Your website can get hacked and deleted or a mistake in the website can destroy everything. Then a backup version will save your day. So always choose backup – and also do it yourself.

Statistics

Some web hosts offers a fully detail statistic system.  Of course you should not say no to this, if you get this for free. But don’t pay for it – it is to easy to implement statistic systems for free on your website, e.g. Google Analytics.

Support for multiple domain names

Some web hosts offers you to have more than one domain name associated with your web hotel. This is a good thing because you can then both buy the domain www.your-domain.com and www.yourdomain.com and point it to the same website.

Does the web host have 24/7 service?

You need to choose a web host that supports 24/7 service, since it is important that if your website goes down, someone is working on getting it online again. If your website is offline to long time, you can loose a lot of customers and money.

Price

Don’t pay too much for a web hotel. But price and service is related in some cases. The most important relations is often, that your website will load quicker, which also is very important for SEO (Search engine optimization).

Checklist for buying a web hotel

In the table below, you can see a conclusion on what I think is important for you to remember, when you have to choose a web hotel.

Service	Important to check
Programming language	Does it support your website files? I recommend choosing PHP-suites.
Webspace	Start with a low amount of Mb – you can always upgrade.
Traffic	Always unlimited
E-mail addresses	Go for unlimited numbers
Sub domains	Should be supported and free
FTP access	Should be supported
Backup	Should be supported
Statistics	Don’t pay for it – it can easy be implemented on website for free
Multiple domains	Should be supported
24/7 service	Should be supported

Do you want to transfer your Google+ profile to a new account? You can do this using Google Takeout – a tool to transfer your Google content from Google. You can also download an archive with your Google content with this tool, such as your +1, your contacts, your Buzz content, Drive content, Google+ circles, Google+ stream, Google+ profile, YouTube content and Picasa web albums.

The tool on Google Takeout that you need is the Google+ circles transfer tool. With this tool you enter the Source account (which Google+ profile should the circles come from?) and destination account (which account should the circles be transferred to?).

When you have set the tool to transfer your profile, the job will first be done after 7 days. When these 7 days are gone, the process will last for 48 hours and in this time you have limited access to use Google+ (limited sharing and connecting). In this time you might see that some of your circles has not yet been transferred. Before the start of the transfer after 7 days, you are able to cancel the transfer.

The transfer tool only transfers two things: Your circles and your connections. It does not transfer your profile – you have to build this up from the start again. It does not transfer your posts, sharings, comments or +1 – these will be lost with your old account. And it does not transfer your Google+ community memberships – you have to apply for membership again.

If you have authorship to your source profile, this will not either be transferred, but will stay on your source profile. Try to establish authorship again to your new account and remove the reference to the old account, then it should move to the destination profile.

The transfer tool does not only transfer your circles and connections, but also replaces the connection to you in your connections profiles. When the transfer has ended, the circles and connections has been removed from the source account. The transfer tool cannot be used twice in a 6 month period.

If you administrate some Google+ pages or communities, this administration is not easy to move. First let the destination profile get member in the community. Then make the destination profile moderator and after 2 weeks, you can make the destination profile administrator. So this process also takes 2 weeks.

When the transfer has been completed, you can remove your old profile, by going to the settings and downgrade the profile and choose “Delete your entire Google+ profile”.

What should Google improve in the tool?:

• The tool should be able to also move posts, sharings and +1.
• It should be possible to move the administrator profile of communities and pages quicker.
• It should be possible to move memberships of communities.

I don’t think the tool will ever be able to work more than twice each 6 months, because Google does not wish people to transfer accounts all the time. And the 7 days waiting is also because they want people to really think about what they are doing before moving the account. But the issues mentioned above should be possible to develop.

Now, where the clock is ticking towards 2013, it is time to look on what happened in 2012 on the SEO-front and say a little about my expectations for 2013. 2012 was a year, where Google changed there algorithm a lot with different updates (e.g. PANDA and PENGUIN updates). The main purpose for these updates was to upgrade the quality of search results.

Beside this, Google seriously rolled out there own social network Google+, by launching Google Authorship, a link between articles you write on websites and your Google+ profile, and launching Google communities, that will make people debate on a lot of topics on Google+. Why is these two launches important for SEO. Google Authorship is important for SEO, because it links your social activity to your website and hence marketing of your website on Google+ becomes much more important in the future. Google communities is important for SEO, because it gives a new way to brand your products on Google+.

These changes and what they meant for SEO in 2012, leads me to the following expectations on how we are using SEO in 2013:

• Marketing on social networks, especially Google+, will become much more important in 2013. Many people expect, that the social activity about your website, e.g. number of shares, number of +1 and number of comments on links to your site will become a factor in determine your place in the search results in 2013.
• The quality of the content of websites will become a bigger factor for SEO in 2013. A high quality article, is a long article (minimum 500 words) with a lot of pictures and YouTube movies, that is well written and is shared and commented a lot. Google improve there algorithm to become better to detect quality of content, and I expect there will become much more of this i 2013.
• Another trend we have seen is that much more people gets smartphones and tablets and view websites using this. That leads to an expectation about websites become much more mobile friendly in 2013. Developing a mobile version of a website will become more common.
• Good page titles and meta descriptions will still be important. Also other visible elements in the search result page, such as authorship and rich snippets will stay important, because they are eye-catchy. I don’t expect Google to remove the Google+ profile photo of the author of content from the search result page, because it shows the searcher the quality of the article. I expect Google to put a logo of a company in the search result page as well, when the companies websites has setup publisher relation.
• Google will become better to detect duplicate content, so this is not the way to go, when you are thinking SEO value of your website.
• Link building will still be an important part of SEO. It shows quality, because the visitor is willing to link to the content.
• Too many keywords is not good for SEO, because it signals keyword stuffing. But to few gives Google the idea that the article is not specific enough about the keyword. It is therefore important to find a balance in the number of keywords used. This balancing will become more important, because Google will give penalty to websites with too many keywords. Maybe some tests on this issue should be made – how many keywords i acceptable?

So the conclusion on how you should create content with a high SEO-value in 2013:  Write high-quality, long content and use time to link build and market it on Google+ and other social networks. Make the content easy to read by search engines (good titles, meta descriptions, rich snippets, authorship, readable URLs etc.). The rule of tumb must be: If it is easy to make the content, the content does not have a high SEO-value.

These were my expectations for where SEO will go in 2013. What are your expectations?

Do you have WordPress blog with comments, where you’re comments gets filled with spam messages all the time? This guide shows you how get a spam free WordPress blog.

The purpose for spammers to post spam posts in your comments is to place a link that goes either to there spam website or to an affiliate site, that they earn money on. Spam posts are generally characterized by:

• A lot of links in the post
• A lot of keywords
• A comment that is praising your article (can also be real comments)
• A comment that doesn’t make sense
• An e-mail address or name that is composed of random letters (e.g. xYthsgy).

The links can both be placed directly in the comment content or as the link for the spammers website (often comments is followed by the name, e-mail and website address by the comment author – spammers use this website address to place a spam link).

In many cases the posting of spam comments is a robot, so it is done automatically to a lot of WordPress blogs in no time.

The comment is a positive, praising article – can’t I keep it?

No, it is not a good idea to keep spam posts, because they may lead to a lower ranking in Googles search result page, i.e. lower Google page rank  This is because links to spam sites is bad neighborhood (SEO word for you linking to spam sites), and Google will then associate your site with this bad neighborhood.

If you decide to keep the comment anyway, make sure to remove all links in the comment and e-mail and website link of the comment author.

If the comment is full of keywords, your site may be associated with a keyword stuffing, which will also lower your page rank.

Protect your comments and posts against spam

There are many methods to keep your WordPress blog spam free. A list of them may be:

• the posting of posts or comments is restricted, so that only confirmed users can post.
• the posting of posts or comments is restricted, so that it must be approved by an moderator or administrator.
• Using a CAPTCHA -fields that may prevent against robots posting a post.
• Using different WordPress plugins that scans every post of spam, and then let you approve them before published.
• Don’t let any publish posts or comments.

Restricted commenting and posting

An effective way to lower the risk of spam is to restrict the ability of guests to publish posts or comments. You can setup WordPress to only allow comments, when visitors is logged in. This is done in the Dashboard by:

1. Go to the WordPress Dashboard
2. Choose Settings and then Discussion settings
3. Under “Other comment settings”, make sure that “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” is checked.

You can also setup WordPress to only publish comments when they have been approved by a moderator or administrator. This is done by:

1. Go to the WordPress Dashboard
2. Choose Settings and then Discussion settings
3. Under “Before a comment appears” make sure that “A comment is held for moderation” is checked or that “An administrator must always approve the comment” is checked, if only an administrator must approve comments.

You can also partly restrict the commenting, by choosing to hold back a comment when it contains too many hyperlinks, which was a characteristic of spam comments. You set this up by:

1. Go to the WordPress Dashboard
2. Choose Settings and then Discussion settings
3. Under “Comment moderation” set the number of hyperlinks that will result in a hold back of the comment.

You can also in the “Comment moderation” section define some words that will result in comment moderation, or some words that automatically will mark the comment as spam.

Using CAPTCHA fields

CAPTCHA fields is a field that the comment author must fill out to be able to post the comment. The idea behind the CAPTCHA field is, that it is a question only a human can answer. The questions is randomized for each time a comment is made. In this way, it will prevent robots posting comments.

The easiest way to implement CAPTCHA fields is to install a plugin that adds this field. A recommended plugin is the SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plugin you can download for free.

With this plugin you can also setup the plugin to hide the CAPTCHA field, when a user is logged in. This will make it hard for guest visitors to post comments, but easier for users to do it.

The CAPTCHA field is a picture, either composed by letters that you must write in another field or a calculation that you must answer. The letters in the picture is made so it is not easy to read by a word scan software, that robots may use.

Using WordPress plugins

There are a lot of WordPress plugins you can install, so they can handle the spam comments. One of the most used is the Akismet plugin, which is actually installed by default when you install WordPress. The plugin must be activated by a code you get for free. This plugins will automatically scan all comments and mark them as spam, if they have these characteristics. The disadvantage of this plugin is that it interact with a 3rd party website, which someone may not like.

Another plugins is Antispam bee that is also free. This plugin does not interact with a 3rd party website and is completely anonymously and without registration. It uses an analysis algorithm to mark comments as spam.

You can also look at WP-SpamFree WordPress Plugin, that works without using CAPTCHA fields. However, please pay attention to the fact that there is no longer any support on this plugin.

Don’t let any publish comments or posts

Really many WordPress blogs use the ability to post comments to their blog posts, without having an actually wish of having comments of posts. You should therefore always consider if you really need to have comment activated.

You can deactivate comments in WordPress by:

1. Go to the WordPress Dashboard
2. Choose Settings and then Discussion settings
3. Under “Default article settings” make sure that “Allow people to post comments on new articles ” is unchecked.

You should also not setup your blog so users are able to post guest postings without really wishing this.

Everyone who have build websites using the CMS (Content Management System) WordPress, have their own favorite plugins that they use again and again and is a must-have for all their sites. Here are a list of all the WordPress plugins I use for all my websites.

AdRotate

AdRotate is the perfect system for managing ads on your website. With this plugins you will be able to add your ads, group them and create blocks. You can also enable tracking of your ads and see a full statistic report of which ads that are clicked on and a calculation of the CTR (Click through rate).

Find AdRotate here.

Akismet

WordPress have one disadvantage over other CMS – it is very exposed to spam (which is because WordPress is so popular). But there is a solution to avoid spam on WordPress – just install Akismet and it will scan all comments for spam and report this to you. You must approve the comments before they are used. Akismet i default installed in all new installations of WordPress today.

Download Akismet for free here.

Exclude pages from navigation

Have you ever created pages that you didn’t want to show in the navigation menu? All pages is showed in the navigation menu of WordPress by default. With this plugin you can choose to hide some of the pages from the navigation menu.

Download the plugin here.

Fancier author box

When you have a WordPress blog it is very important to link your posts to your Google+ profile by using Google Authorship. With this plugin you can show an author box in the bottom of each of your posts, and there link to your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ profile. This makes it easy to establish Google Authorship on WordPress. This author box is very beautiful and free.

Download for free here.

Google Analytics for WordPress

This plugin adds the Google Analytics tracking code to your WordPress site. It is very easy to begin with, because you simply just login to Google Analytics and authorize the use of the tracking code. Another advantage is that you can easy setup tracking of clicks on outgoing links.

Download here.

GD star rating

If you want people to be able to rate your articles and showed the rating in Googles search result page, this is the WordPress plugin for you. Showing rating stars in search result page is more eye-catchy and may lead to an increase in the number of visitors.

Download here.

NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster

This WordPress plugin is amazing. When you publish a posts on your WordPress blog, it will automatically post it to different social networks, e.g. Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious etc.

Download for free here.

nrelate Related Content

Show a list of related posts to a post with this WordPress plugin. This is a very good method for increasing the number of page views and decrease the bounce rate.

Download here.

Paypal donations

With this plugin you can enable your visitors to donate an amount of money to support your site. See an example of this plugin in the right menu of this site. The donated money will be payed to your Paypal account.

Download the plugin here.

WordPress SEO

This is a great SEO plugin for WordPress. The plugin is developed by the famous SEO expert Joost de Valk (called Yoast). It will solve the most common SEO issues and analyze each post you write and come with recommendations to how you can increase the SEO value of the post. It also solves the missing META description in WordPress, which is very important for SEO.

Download the plugin here.

Pretty Link Lite

With this WordPress plugin you can shrink and track URLs on your site. Can also be used for hiding affiliate links on your WordPress site.

Download here.

Peter’s Post Notes

Add internal notes in the admin section for each post, e.g. ideas for improving the article. Can be very useful if you have some notes you don’t want to share with your visitors.

Download WordPress plugin here.

Hupso Share Buttons for Twitter, Facebook & Google+

Add a row of share buttons for a lot of social networks – not only Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Essential for all sites, to enable visitors to share your site.

Download here.

Broken Link Checker

This plugin scans your site to find links that doesn’t work and images that are missing. It will then tell you on the WordPress dashboard. Increase the quality of your site with this plugin.

Download here.

Subscribe to comments Reloaded

With this plugin you get a checkbox with your comment form where readers can subscribe to new comments.

Download it here.

You can find more plugins for WordPress here. If you have any suggestions to plugins, that is a must-have plugins, please feel free to post them in the comment section.

A CMS (Content Management System) is a complete website-solution, that makes you able to build a professional website, without learning programming, but instead you can focus on building high-quality content. You install the CMS on your FTP-server and then you build the website by installing various modules, plugins and themes for your CMS. For the most-used CMS, there exist a lot of different, free modules, plugins and themes you can install – but you can also buy some cheap, if you need something more.

There exist very many different CMS, the Top 3 is: WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. In this article we will look on the difference on the different CMS and when you should use which CMS.

WordPress

WordPress is the most used CMS in the world (see the map below from W3Techs). The map shows which CMS that are most used in which country. The green represents WordPress, The orange Joomla and the pink Drupal. There are no doubt that WordPress is the most used system in most countries.

From W3Techs, you can also see the latest overview over market share among CMS in the world. As you can see WordPress has a market share of 55,1%, where Joomla have only 8,7% and Drupal only 7,1%. WordPress has the biggest increase in market share at the moment (0,3% in a month). So WordPress isn’t only the CMS that has the biggest market share, but also the CMS with the biggest increase in market share.

But why is WordPress so popular? It was first released back in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg. Since then it has come to version 3.5, that has been released recently. WordPress is a blogging-CMS and was build for blogging, although you through themes and plugins can build WordPress so it looks like an ordinary website.

It exist in two versions, a self-hosting version you can download and install on your own host or a free-hosted version. The free-hosted version is easy to start with, partly because you don’t have to own your own host and partly because it is already installed. The disadvantage is that there is limitations in this version: You cannot install your own plugins, you cannot install your own themes and you are not aloud to place your own advertising on the sites. This means you cannot customize it as you like and you cannot earn money on the website. Some plugins that would be good to have installed, but you cannot in the hosted version, is plugin for Google Analytics and plugins for showing ads. In the self-hosted version you can install all plugins and themes as you like.

WordPress is very easy to start with. It is very streamlined in the structure and almost never crashes. The privileges is very easy to control (however it is not easy to add more privileges), security is in top, the design is nice and most important of all: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is very implemented, so you from the start get a high place in search engines. There is build-in-pinging which means the site is easily spread around the world.

The disadvantage of WordPress is that there is not so many build in settings on pages, posts, users etc. as you can find in Joomla. Therefore you cannot control the structure fully very easy with WordPress, as you can in Joomla. However this will only be a problem for about 1%, because for most users the structure of WordPress works fine.

WordPress is very easy to update, it actually almost happens automatically – something Joomla and Drupal can learn from. Actually they also have update-functions, but they don’t work so automatically and smooth as WordPress’ update-section. This means that when you use WordPress, you can be sure to always have updated CMS and updated themes and plugins. We can also from the table below see, that almost all WordPress users is updated (table comes from W3Techs):

You can download WordPress from here and get a free hosted version here. An example of a WordPress site is this blog – it is build from WordPress 3.5.

Joomla

Joomla was released in 2005, from another CMS called Mambo. As WordPress you can also install a lot of addons and themes. Where you can only install addons in the form of plugins in WordPress, you can also do it as modules and components in Joomla.

Joomla has recently been releasing version 3 for betatest. Version 3 has a lot of change in the design, and maybe this version will lead to growth of market share of Joomla. Joomla has been criticized for having too big, ugly icons in the admin section. This is over in version 3, where the icons is replaced by a beautiful topmenu.

Joomla is also very easy to start with and there is many very good plugins and modules you can install. It is very easy to setup privileges for Joomla, and the security is in top.

You can download Joomla for free from this site. An example of a Joomla-site is one of my other, danish sites: Apandersen.dk, if you will take a look.

Drupal

Drupal is the CMS for geeks, cause it isn’t easy to start with, although they are getting better. It started in 2001, where the first version was released. It started as a messageboard, written by Dries Buytaert. As with Joomla and WordPress, you can install addons called core modules and core themes for Drupal.

Something different for Drupal is that there exist distributions, just like linux distributions. These are finished, packed version of Drupal including core packages. This makes it easier for people to start with Drupal.

Drupal might be the system with the highest learning curve, but the benefit is that you can customize it much more as you want it. This benefits a lot of sites, as magazines and government sites. But Drupal might not be the place you should start, if you haven’t tried any CMS before. The usability is not very easy with Drupal, because the interface is very confusing. And the biggest problem for Drupal is that the developers don’t see the problem as big as the customers.

Drupal can be downloaded from here.

Blogger

Blogger is also a CMS delivered by Google. You cannot download and host it yourself, but it is completely free. It is the 5. most popular CMS and actually the 2. most growing CMS in market share.

Other CMS

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal is the biggest CMS you can get. But there exist a lot of other CMS. Here are some of them:

Discuz! – the biggest CMS in China
vBulletin – the 5. most popular CMS
Datalife Engine
Sharepoint
SPIP
NQcontent