Akismet
Spam is one of the curses of the Internet…
Others include, Phishing, viruses and pornography
Akismet deals with the spam – you have to find ways of dealing with other pests.
Let’s just say what Comment spam is. It can be pointless or rude comments made by dummies and it can be machine generated crap done with the purpose of generating a backlink to a site.
Luckily Akismet deals with all of it!
Akismet is an automatic ( which is what the “a” stands for ) plugin that dishes out justice aka “kismet“.
It is pronounced “a” , “kiz”, “mit”.
There are other spam plugins but I’ve not tried them since Akismet operates so well.
In operation it scans incoming comments and if it considers that they are spam comments it diverts them into a spam folder. In that it resembles a spam filter on email and like email it gives you a chance to rescue something you want!
To activate it you have to create an account at WordPress which creates a “key” or code which needs to be entered into a box in akismet itself. This is easy to do and only takes a few seconds. The same key is used to activate akismet on all your WordPress blogs.
Akismet currently features a fun graph and stats table bother of which are simply eye candy and no use at all so I’m not going to waste time going over it.
This is a total must have in a WordPress blog unless of course you have “Comments” turned off.
In my opinion that is not a blog. What do you think and if you use a different spam plugin does it work well and how is it different?
Spam Resources:
- Akismet http://akismet.com/download/
- Spam Karma http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/
- Wired http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2002/06/53102
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Filed under WordPress Plugins by on Feb 28th, 2009. 2 Comments. 
I intended to discuss Off Page SEO aka backlinks in the SEO Plugins post – but it was getting a bit too long. So let’s discuss it here…
The job of a search engine is to respond in the best way possible to a search phrase entered by someone looking for an answer.
To do that it has to index the web or catalogue the web so that it knows what is where.
Here comes the really interesting part of this…
The only way that a search engine can find web pages or blog posts is by following links. It stands to reason that if you make sure there are lots of links going to your web page or blog post the search engine will find it easily.
And we live in a democratic age…
Google regards each link going to your page or post to be like a vote. Think of it this way – if you are blogging about something and you think of a great resource (maybe a news story or a video) on a particular web site or blog you will put the link to that resource in your post -you have voted for the web page.
The more votes the better, right?
About now you might be wondering how this helps you to know all this?
There are 2 concrete ways in which this helps you
- If you know that votes / links help you then why not write the best quality material you can – whatever that means to you so that you attract attention and votes/ links to your material
- There’s an old saying that “if you want something done properly do it yourself” – so let’s just say that if you want links to your web site or blog why not make them?
What is stopping you in submitting articles with a link to your web page or blog to the article directories? What is stopping you creating a string of web pages / blogs at Squidoo, wetpaint, Weebly, blogger, wordpress etc to get some links?
Yes and the old favourites of posting in forums still works and new faves too such as twitter
It is simply a matter of putting in the time and effort. Helping the search engines to find you with a boatload of links is a clear and obvious activity that all bloggers and web masters engage in to get more links and visitors
That’s visitors as in readers and buyers. And whether you blog for income or influence you want attention. What we have found is that if you want attention you need to follow a plan of action to build links to your pages and posts.
As you build links you will see your visitor numbers increase – provided of course you have installed the shortstat plugin we discussed in the first post of this series
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Filed under WordPress Plugins by on Feb 27th, 2009. Comment.
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