If you write a blog, you’ll get plenty of blog comment spam.

In plain English, blog comment spam is when people visit your site and comment on a post in the hope that your readers will click on the link in their name, visit their site and click on those Google AdSense ads you’ll inevitably encounter there. This will earn them a couple of cents. Not much – but if they have enough sites doing the same thing, this can create a substantial revenue. The fact that it fills the internet with more garbage doesn’t interest them.

So how does it work? The spammer monitors keywords relevant to the ads he is hosting. His software alerts them whenever those keywords have been used. In the case of mattresskings.info (above) the keyword was ‘mattress’ – and I used it in the title of a post I published recently on www.enterprisecafe.tv.

When they pick up a mention of their keyword, they then visit your site (either in person or via a ‘bot – I don’t know the technology involved) and leave a comment.

You can usually tell a spam comment because it tries to sound interested and human – but in a really naff and non-specific kind of way. “Great post, I’ll definitely visit here again – look forward to hearing more of your experiences about this topic” is a good example.

The hope is that you’ll be either be naiive, flattered or careless enough to allow this comment to be published on your blog. Why? Because the commenter’s name is a link back to their site with it’s AdSense ads waiting for your clicks.

Click here to visit this spammers ‘site’. Click on the picture (above) to see the components of a typically spammy site.

First thing you’ll see is that the Google ads that earn the spammer his living are always near the top. Google ads means ‘this site is about making me money’. The nearer the top they are, the more about ‘making me money’ the site is.

Secondly, the site doesn’t represent anyone, anywhere – and it isn’t selling anything (except your clicks to the advertising network.)

Thirdly, the copy is clearly junk – lifted from any and everywhere online. It’s not meant to make sense, just so long as it has the spammer’s keyword in it.

And finally, it has an endless list of links to internal pages filled with more crap designed to spam Google and get the site found in the search engine results for the keyword ‘mattress’.

So the quick and simple way to decide whether a comment on your blog is spam or not is to click on the author’s link (before you approve it) and take a quick scan of their site.

Remember: vague comment, AdSense ads on their site, not selling anything and crap content = SPAM.

]]> http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/blog-comment-spam-what-does-it-look-like/feed/ 0 http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/how-write-goodblog-post-titles/ http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/how-write-goodblog-post-titles/#comments Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:56:59 +0000 Sam Deeks http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/?p=584 Don’t miss out on your blogs most powerful aspect – the post titles!

If you’re a newcomer to blogging it’s all too easy to get swept up in the excitement of publishing – and overlook one of the basics of blogging – the role of your blog post title in getting found in Google.

There are two kinds of bloggers: those who understand the part the post title plays in Google visibility and want exploit that and those who don’t (or do understand it but choose not to exploit it).

The first group of people would write a title for this post something like the one I’ve used above: “How to write good blog post titles” after thinking carefully about what someone looking for guidance might type into Google.

The second group of people would write a title for this post like: “There are two kinds of blogger…”

Broadly speaking, Google looks at each post created in blogging software like WordPress or Blogger as an individual web page. When someone searches for something, Google judges the relevance of your post / page through a number of factors – but principally by matching the keywords in your title, headers and first paragraph of text.

What does that mean for the blogger who wants their blog to be found by their intended prospects and to draw in new visitors?

It means the following:

1) You’ve got to use a blogging platform that Google can read and index easily (WordPress is acknowledged to be the best). If your web designer has knocked you up some kind of ‘blog’ to keep you happy but which isn’t Google visible, then you might be entertaining your existing website visitors but you won’t be bringing in any new ones.

2) Write post titles that reflect what people might be searching for. So many people write posts titles like esoteric diary entries: “A mysterious day at the office..” or “You got to try this” or “So long, friend – we’ll miss you”. Who is going to be searching for “A mysterious day at the office” in Google?

3) Try to avoid the dreaded “ramblings of…” blog subtitle. It’s a sure sign that you think that your blog’s purpose is to present your diary to a breathless waiting world. It isn’t.

To make the most of the power of blogging, we recommend you think of your blog as having two audiences and two entry points. One entry point is the ‘front page’ – where your existing friends and customers are likely to enter your blog. The other entry point is wherever Google brings people into your blog through a particular post it has given them in response to their search.

To illustrate this: you’re an existing customer of mine so I say ‘hey, come and visit our blog here”.

Or:

You’re a web designer in the USA looking for a solution to a problem – how to hide a site you’re building until it’s finished. You type “hiding a wordpress blog” in Google and get this.  Your entry point to our blog is through that particular post, not the front page.

So remember, use a powerful blogging platform; write post titles, headers and content with the keywords your prospects will be searching with in mind and don’t forget you’re also writing to entertain and inform real people about real things.

Here’s the ‘mu:kaumedia PIG-simple guide to what’s probably happened (many thanks to Otto42 in the WordPress Codex):

WP 2.6 has a new image uploader.

This creates different code (or something technical and complicated) for aligning images than the old one did.  If your blog theme’s CSS file was written for WordPress 2.5 then it won’t recognise the alignment instructions given by your new image uploader.

Result? Text won’t flow around the image no matter how many times you click the alignment buttons.

Solution?

Go into your Theme Editor in your dashboard and copy and paste the code shown in the pic (right) – available to copy and paste here - into the end of your theme’s ‘style.css’ file and save.

Magically, your images will fall into place and the text will behave itself just like in the good old days.

As more and more people express their pleasure, frustration or anger at our products and services online, more and more of us are going to find ourselves wondering about the difference between legitimate criticism and defamation.

You may well find yourself dealing, at some point, with an vengeful individual who has made it his/her business to tell the world that you’re a cowboy and should be avoided like the plague. Negative criticism like that can seriously damage your reputation, there’s no doubt about it.

So where does the line fall between someone’s right to express their opinion and defamation?

Let’s make some distinctions first.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation defines defamation as “a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to someone’s reputation, and published ‘with fault’, meaning as a result of negligence or malice.” Slander is spoken defamation, libel is written defamation.

In plain Inglish, defamation against you is: A false statement, presented as fact either deliberately intended to harm your reputation or as the result of negligence.

Three things have to be proved to win a day-to-day defamation claim:

1) The statement was published to at least one other person apart from you

2) The false-ness of the statement

3) That it is understood a) to concern the you and b) intended to harm you

However, if you happen to be a public figure, you have to go a step further and prove actual malice.

So there you go. If you find someone saying nasty things about your business on their blog, measure it against those guidelines. If you think you’ve been defamed, it’s going to cost you time and money to prove it.

So far as online reputation management is concerned it’s pretty much academic whether or not you win a defamation case a year later because the damage is already done. By the time you emerge victorious from the High Court it will be history and the only person who will care about it will be you.

The lesson here is that you’ve got to keep in mind that online reputation management isn’t about proving ‘the truth’ to anyone. It’s about hearing what’s really being said, assessing the threats and opportunities that arise – and most importantly, responding in a way that builds your reputation instead of damaging it further.

By all means take it to court but first, take it to an online reputation expert to help you chart a course through the difficult time ahead.

Listening to the masses, you would be forgiven for thinking that ‘Latent Semantic Indexing‘ was some kind of new, sophisticated SEO technique you should be applying to your site.

The term came to my attention again this week in an email from someone who put ‘LSI’ in a list of strategies he was considering for boosting his site traffic.

If fact, latent semantic indexing describes a process by which a search engine might rank your page by evaluating the semantic ‘context’ in which your keywords appear.

Thus you can’t just fill your website or blog with the word ‘Tractor’ and hope to sail to the top of Google when someone searches for ‘tractors’. Latent semantic indexing provides the search engine with a pool of other expected and ‘semantically’ related words; so you’d better think about including “farmyard”, “collie”, “chicken”, “combine”, “set-aside” and “huge EU subsidy” to name but a few.

If you’re thinking of paying some handsome young thing a hefty wedge of money to apply ‘LSI’ to your site to increase your page rank, dont’ bother because there’s a much cheaper and far more effective way to ensure the semantic integrity of your keyword placement.

Just write real stuff for a real audience to read.

The alternative?  This. It’s beyond irony.

People think that this whole Google search engine thing is vastly complex. Millions of eyes glaze over at the mention of reciprocal links, latent semantic indexing, keyword density and countless other bits of confusing jargon.

Behind all that stuff, it’s very simple – in the way that behind the exploded diagram of a Haynes manual the way that a combustion engine works is essentially simple: it explodes petrol and air and uses the force of those explosions to turn some wheels. Ok. Got that.

Google began as a programme for indexing online documents based their content, allowing it to retrieve those documents when a user typed in a search string that matched. Nothing too magical there; it’s what computers do best. But of the millions of documents that might match a search term, how does a computer decide which should appear first?

This is the problem – the opportunity – that Google seized and capitalised.

It was obvious to Google that online information had to have some kind of weighting or value – something that it doesn’t intrinsically have in digital form. Without that value, we can’t make sense of anything but more importantly, ‘the top of the Google search results’ doesn’t mean anything.

It also became clear that the more robust that weighting system was, the more valuable the first few pages of search results would become as online advertising real-estate.

Google quickly realised that there was two kinds of information: commercial (people selling goods and services) and non-commercial (people NOT selling goods and services). If Google could introduce a ‘value’ system to online information that worked for both kinds of information, it could make billions from commercial information (via pay per click advertising) at the same time as allowing non-commercial information to keep the same kinds of ‘value’ it had in the book-based world.

The way Google does this is to weigh up a page’s relevance to the search currently being done. If the page is judged highly relevant to that search, Google will put that page high up in the search results. This judgement of ‘relevance’ is itself complex and ever-changing (it has to be to counter people trying constantly to artificially engineer themselves to the top of Google) but in essence simple to understand.

Consider the world of online information just a world, like ours. Important information is judged as important for a whole number of reasons: how it’s ranked by respected institutions and expert individuals, how many people refer to it, how often it’s consulted, the context it’s set in and so on. Whatever Google builds in to its algorithms to determine ‘relevance’, rest assured that its purpose is to ensure that online information has a comparative value.

Why? Because a browser is only so big and can only display 10 ‘natural’ results and 10 ‘pay per click’ results on one page. That first two or three pages is only valuable real-estate for Google so long as it remains in control of the underlying value system that orders online information.

99% of what you read and hear about Google with all its accompanying jargon is spoken by people trying to engineer their way to the first two or three pages of either the natural or the paid search engine results.

Google itself has very little to say because – apart from what I’ve outlined above – there is very little else to say. Google is far less mysterious and complex than people think but it’s no less profound and powerful for that.

All of the above points to the fact that, so long as Google exists there will only be two ways to get to the top of Google.

1) For free - in the ‘natural’ search results (by creating fresh, keyword-rich, semantically-relevant, regularly-updated, peer-approved content)

2) By paying – in the ‘sponsored’ or ‘pay-per-click’ search results (also governed by how popular and relevant your ads are considered to be)

That other 99% of Google chatter would have you believe that there are other ways, means, products or services to get you to the top of Google. There aren’t. There’s only the above two ways or there’s spam.

A website needs to be:

1) Well designed. Even if it’s one page, a site needs to look professional and graphically attractive. If not, it doesn’t matter how effectively it works, people will still judge it to be atiquated or naff.

2) Easily found by Google for your business’s keywords. If each of your page titles is just your name and your company name, then your designer doesn’t understand how Google works. It’s not hard to write page titles with Google in mind.

3) Easy to update. Fresh content is the oxygen that keeps your site alive in Google’s eyes. If you have to run back to your web designer every time you want / need to add something, one of two things is going to happen: you’re either going to get fleeced or you’ll end up in a bitter relationship because everything will have to depend on the designer’s ‘goodwill’.

If you ONLY check out these three things before going ahead with your web project, you’ll save yourself a lot of money and a considerable amount of stress.

How can you check these points out?

1) Well designed: If you’re not sure, ask other people to look at the company’s work. Do other people consider it good-looking? Professional?

2) Easily found: Look at a site the company has designed. Do the page titles have that business’s keywords built in? Do a Google search on what you think that business’s keywords are. See where the site appears. Ask the designer to explain how they plan to work on your site’s search engine optimisation with you.

3) Easy to update: Ask the web design company what kind of ‘content management system’ (CMS) your site will have. Make sure you know what you need to change / how often. Find out how easy it will be to use the CMS. Make sure you understand how to use keywords in the content you plan to add.