I used to change the codes in Wordpress core too. But since I found this, the Add Link Attribute plugin, I don’t need to modify any of Wordpress files and the nofollow will remain in effect throughout WP updates.

I explained how to add nofollow to various links generated by Wordpress PHP functions like tag links, edit post links, author’s posts links, links in the comment section. Basically, all you need to do is rewriting the original code in the form that Add Link Attribute function understands. Learn how to translate the codes on Adding NoFollow to Any Links Generated by WordPress.

However, I haven’t managed to add nofollow to the categories links using the plugin. If there’s any of you know how to do so, feel free to add to the conversation and I’ll update this article and give you the credits.

Review this article and get a chance to win $250! More information here.

Note: If you want to add nofollow to ALL outgoing links automatically, you can use this plugin, External Links by Semiologic.

If you want to add nofollow to ALL links, outgoing and internal inside your article, use the Add Link Attribute I mentioned above and replace this code:

<?php the_content(__('Read more'));?>

with this:

<?php add_link_attr('the_content', 'Read more', 'rel="nofollow"');?>

Let me know if there’s a problem.

Read more:

1. Adding NoFollow to Any Links Generated by WordPress This is a
2. Busby SEO Test – Preserving Your PageRank In this ar
3. Blogging – Dividing Your Post into Pages in WordPress I can
4. Busby SEO Test – Wordpress Hack to Make Your Site Loads Faster Take a loo

Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz did some testing around internal links and anchor text and found some interesting results.

1. Internal Anchor Text Has Very Little Impact on the Homepage
2. Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
3. Beyond a Certain Point, Adding More Internal Links to a Page Does Not Necessarily Flow More Anchor Text Value

In my early effort to compete in Busby SEO Test, I placed links to my competing page almost everywhere on my site and feed. Whether it triggers or not bad reactions from Google, I decided to reduce the amount of patternal internal linking to my Busby SEO Test page.

Rand’s experiment suggest that previously penalized page is restored its position and indexing right away after the excessive links are removed. However, there is also an assumption that immediate change to your internal linking structure can cause another penalty. These two poles apart theory of how Google works makes either if I keep the links or not both risky alternatives.

So why did I choose to strip the links?

I believe that Google is getting more human in determining which links are natural and staying away from patterns time to time. Therefore I tried to emerge links to the articles I want to promote the most natural way. One of the methods I’m using is by writing related articles and using the related articles plugin. The related articles list is a dynamic list which content changes everytime new articles are submitted.

Other way, if I choose to display links to the Busby SEO Test page to increase awareness, I’d add the nofollow attribute to make it bot friendly .

How about links on your navbar or sidebar? I’ll say leave them as they were. I do. However I try not to add more sitewide internal links in the future.

I’d love to know your experience in your own sitewide internal linking. Do they bring satisfying results? And if you made any changes to your linking structure, hows the result?

Review this article and get a chance to win $250! More information here.

Read more:

1. Busby SEO Test – Get A Share of My Victory! Up to $2500 for 10 A few mome
2. Busby SEO Test – Duplicate Content Debate One of the
3. Busby SEO Test – Preserving Your PageRank In this ar
4. Busby SEO Test – Wordpress Hack to Make Your Site Loads Faster Take a loo

However, there are one or two that I feel need to be added another point of view just to balance.

• Breadcrumbs are a great internal linking tool. Use them for usability and anchor text differentiation.
• In-content links not only tend to have a higher click through rate and perceived trust, but are also able to add more relevance to a link because of the surrounding text.

Breadcrumbs and in-content links are usually located below the navbar. And also, links in breadcrumbs and the content may have been mentioned in the navbar. An experiment result posted on SEOMoz explains that only the first anchor text counts.

Here’s what I mean — let’s say that on your website’s homepage, you have two links to your blog. The first link is in the top level navigation, and the anchor text is “blog.” The second link is in the body of the homepage and reads “celebrity news blog.” That second link’s anchor text is NOT going to help the blog page rank for “celebrity news” because Google doesn’t appear to count the anchor text from multiple links to a target from a single URL.

The experiment was conducted on the late quarter of 2008 and Google engineers may have modified the way G works once again. But there’s also no obvious certainty that Google hasn’t evolved on this subject. Therefore, it’s necessary to keep the links in an amount that makes sense since extra links other than the first one may not be counted.

• Link to topically relevant pages on important pages of your website. Link to important pages on every (or most) topically relevant page of your website.

The above may do good to promote an article or to create awareness for blog visitors. But another research on SEOMoz which tested the Value of Anchor Text Optimized Internal Links proves that

1. Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
2. Beyond a Certain Point, Adding More Internal Links to a Page Does Not Necessarily Flow More Anchor Text Value

Sometimes, those “important pages” may be our homepage itself. In this matter, the test result shows that

Internal Anchor Text Has Very Little Impact on the Homepage

Google is being more and more humanoid in determining which page should appear on the first page of SERP and their methods in doing so seem to keep any patterned or uniform looking links out of their consideration. While I’m agree that we need to promote other relevant pages, we need to do so in the most natural way as possible. One practice I always do is writing articles based on what I’ve written before to increase the number of related articles generated by “similar post” plugins out there.

Another alternative is by adding the nofollow attribute while keeping the links visible for human visitors. If you’re having trouble adding nofollow links to links generated by Wordpress, I suggest this article on How to Add Nofollow to Any Wordpress Links.

• Some general directories, such as DMOZ, the Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web are still worth submitting your website to. Make sure to submit your site to the most appropriate category.

On its Webmaster Guidelines, Google used to say to “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites”, but since at least October 2008 Google removed the recommendation. Now does it mean Google starts to see links from directories as future threats? Here’s how John Mueller responded on a thread at Google Groups:

I wouldn’t necessarily assume that we’re devaluing Yahoo’s links, I just think it’s not one of the things we really need to recommend. If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it’s obviously fine to get listed there. It’s not something that people have to do though .

And on a live chat documentation between Matt Cutts and Maile Ohaye:

Question: Recently, you removed this suggestion: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?

Google’s Answer: There’s always the chance that we’ll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the “directory” recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren’t great for users. Right now we haven’t changed how we’re weighting directory links–we’ve only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.

Conclusion is, if you can depend on directories to refer to your site than you can spend some time to register your site. But if you’re not sure, it’s better to not trying so hard to get listed on the above mentioned directories since Google may not refer to those directories in the future.

There are also some points I’d like to supply some experiment results to support few points Wiep has listed.

• Use a sitemap. A good sitemap is useful for visitors, useful for search engines and, therefore, useful for you.

This is so true! And here’s the fact that support Wiep’s suggestion

When a Sitemap was submitted the average time it took for the bot to visit the new post was 14 minutes for Google and 245 minutes for Yahoo.   When no Sitemap was submitted and the bot had to crawl to the post, it took 1375 minutes for Google and 1773 for Yahoo.

I guess there’s nothing more to say. Read the rest of the pst and start building and submitting your sitemap if you haven’t!

• Identify your most linked-to pages, and make sure that the link juice flows to your most important pages from there, in a well-optimized way.

Ann Smarty from Search Engine Journal makes it easy for you to find which pages they are! She described the steps and how to

1. Find your site sub pages that have some ranking potential
2. Find more pages that are relevant to your most powerful pages
3. Interlink your pages using your important anchor text

Last but not least, before you head to Wiep’s post to read the whole 69 tactics, here are another two of them you may never heard or thought of

• Search for websites that already mention your business name or URL, but haven’t linked to your website. This works excellently in Yahoo!.
• Look for websites that mention your personal name, but currently don’t link to your site. Use Yahoo! for this as well.

Read more:

1. Busby SEO Test – Does Internal Linking Pattern Still Do The Trick? In other w
2. Blog Monetization – Text Link Advertising by TNX.net TNX.net st
3. Start Blogging – Get Your Site/Blog Indexed ASAP taken from
4. Bare Lying Google Myths A few days

I looked into my robots.txt file and I remembered preventing the indexing of everything started with “feed” and ”page”. The reason I did this was to not having duplicate results from my feed and my page archive.

The information about this blog got PR 4 from N/A doesn’t need to be republished with new URL, but I think I need to do the opposite with my feed related post. So, here it is and I hope it’s still useful.

Feed Error! Source Feed is Too Large…

…maximum size is 512K. This is the error I was getting when I noticed that my feed wasn’t updated with my latest post. At first, I thought that it was due to the blog security precautions I implemented earlier. But when I was done rolling back all the changes, the feed error still occured. Actually, the error itself was pretty self explanatory. But the first thing came up in my mind was the changes I committed the day before. Second was, I didn’t know what to do to troubleshoot the issue.

Now, after figuring out that undoing all the changes didn’t work, I started to look for help at the FeedBurner Help Group. I learned that there are two ways to reduce your feed’s size.

1. Through your feedburner account
2. From your dashboard options

Through your feedburner account

You can add a variable after your original feed address. Here’s from the group directly:

1. Sign in to your FeedBurner account.
2. Click the title of your FeedBurner feed on the My Feeds page.
3. On the feed management page that appears, click the Edit Feed Details… link just below your feed’s title.
4. In the Original Feed Address field, change the address listed there from an example like the following:

   Code:

   http://myblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml
   OR
   http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

   to the following format:

   Code:

   http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=3

   (Note that max-results sets the number of posts you want to have appear in your FeedBurner feed. Any integer value between 1 and 500 is permitted.)

5. Click Save Feed Details. Your changes are immediately applied and FeedBurner re-burns the newly shortened (or lengthened) feed.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me. But try it, maybe it works for you.

The other way to the feed troubleshooting is by reducing the number of items displayed under the “Publicize” tab, in the “BuzzBoost” section on the left. If it fails, change from displaying full feed to just summary feed.

From your dashboard options

If you prefer to stay with full feed to give the most to your readers (or if the above doesn’t work either), go to your WordPress dashboard, head to “Settings”/”Options” | Reading. Look for the setting labeled “Syndication feeds show the most recent” and reduce the number. Mine was 50 and currently I set it to 25…Thank God IT WORKS!

How feeds do you display? Have you got any feed problems? Hoh did you solve the problem?

You may also interested in the following troubleshooting:

• Your blog’s theme changes itself. What’s the solution?
• Another feed problem. No feeds were displayed.
• Someone broke through my front page and replaced its content!

Read more:

1. Feed Error! Source Feed is Too Large… …max
2. Using 404 Error Page for SEO Benefits This artic
3. Overcoming Feedburner’s Ping Service Limitation By default
4. Fixing the 404 Error by Re-saving Permalink Structure Just now I

Whether site load speed affects SERP directly is still arguable. But there are more than enough reasons to believe that site load speed does influence your site’s popularity indirectly.

The larger your page is, the longer it takes to load and fewer people will stay and read the content. Less people know about your content, there’s going to be not uch left to spread the words on your writings by bookmarking, re-tweeting, linking, commenting or even subscribing to your feed.

With Google nowadays takes into account factors like feed subscribers, bookmarks and incoming link to decide a page’s position, it makes sense to optimize our site load speed in order to achieve higher ranking in SERPs.

Across the internet we can find hundreds of articles suggesting ways to minimize site load time. The popular ones are reducing images, third party scripts to eliminating uneccessary php requests.

On my Busby SEO Test entry, I tried to apply those techniques by having the unecessary parts for the competition thrown out and leave them intact for regular visitors. The modification was performed to the sidebar and footer area. If you compare the sidebar and footer between my Busby SEO Test entry and this one for example, you’ll see that the Busby SEO Test entry has no sidebar while the other one has.

Having no sidebar containing banner ads and scripts will increase load time and for the competition, I decide not to load them. I did that by executing a set of command when the blog fulfills a condition declared in the source code.

If you’re not on competition, you can display category based messages to your visitors or anything else you can think of. Interested?

There’s not going to be many programming involved. It’s no rocket science but you still need to make backups before.

Are you ready? Let’s proceed…

We’ll going to use the file sidebar.php for the example. What I’m going to do is adding some codes that will make the blog displays an empty sidebar when visitors are reading my Busby SEO Test page.

• Open the sidebar.php and put this code on the top or right after div id=”sidebar”

<?php if (is_single(’17′)) { ?>

The above codes says that “if the visitor is reading post number 17 then…”. Here, you can make adjustment according to what condition youu want to check. It can be if a visitor is viewing the archives page, an article from a certain author, articles from category X, etc. They are called conditional tags in Wordpress. For more conditional tags, you can find them here.

• Right after the code, supply the command you want to be executed. In my case, nothing. So I’ll just write

<?php } ?>

• Or if you want to add something, you can do it this way

your codes here

<?php } ?>

• You can simply stop here and see the results. But in my case, there’s another condition I must anticipate. That is when people are reading pages other than the page specified above. So instead of the above code I’ll go with

your codes here

<?php } else {?>

your codes here

<? php } ?>

• So, the full code I use to display an empty sidebar when people are reading the Busby SEO Test page and display the full sidebar when they’re on the other pages is

<?php if (is_single(’17′)) { ?>

<?php } else {?>

what needs to be done if other pages are shown

<? php } ?>

Pretty simple isn’t it? As alternatives to (is_single(‘17’), you can choose from the following:

• is_home() – blog is displaying the main page
• !in_category(1) – blog is displaying articles from categories other than category 1 (notice the exclamation mark)
• is_page() – blog is displaying a page
• is_archive() – blog is displaying the archive list
• (is_home() || !in_category(1) || is_page() || is_archive()) – blog is displaying either the main page or articles from categories other than category 1 or a page or an archive list

Any troubles? Shoot me a comment or review the article!

What do you think of this modification? Do you have any other ideas you can share to increase site load speed?

Review this article and get a chance to win $250! More information here.

Read more:

1. Busby SEO Test – Does Internal Linking Pattern Still Do The Trick? In other w
2. Busby SEO Test – Duplicate Content Debate One of the
3. Busby SEO Test – Get A Share of My Victory! Up to $2500 for 10 A few mome
4. Busby SEO Test – Preserving Your PageRank In this ar

PageRank is one of the aspects Google takes into valuation when determining a page’s SERP. The better its PageRank, the higher its possibility to sit on the top placement of SERP. There are loads of articles explaining how to get a high PageRank already but there are less which tell us to preserve them.

In my partaking in Busby SEO Test, I’m trying to limit the amount of values passed by outgoing links in order to preserve the original page’s rank and keeping the value passed high.

The action is based on two most common theories about how an outgoing link affects the page it comes from or the page it leads to.

The first hypothesis states that the more outgoing links a page has, the less PageRank that page will be. In this case, the outgoing link influences its origin.

A second thought declares that no matter how much the outgoing links will be, the page’s rank stays. The number of outgoing links will have an effect on themselves. For example, page A has 5 outgoing links. Therefore, each link will only get 1/5 of the whole value passed throughout the links on page A while the rank of that page remains unchanged.

As uncertain as which one above reflects Google’s algorithm, the following may be applied. It combines both opinions where the amount of links affects the page where they come from and at the same time determines the value of each outgoing link carries.

Based on those possibilities, I tried to anticipate the decrease of my Busby SEO Test page’s rank and limit the number of outgoing links carrying link juice. However, since there are pages I required to link no matter what, I added the attribute nofollow to the link tag. The links than can be outed from your priority list are such as, the edit article link, the RSS subscription link, the affiliate banners, the tag archive links, the bookmarking links, edit comment link and more.

In your opinion, is it worth doing? Does adding nofollow affect your page’s rank much? Or, does having a lot of nofollow tags can harm your rank?

Review this article and get a chance to win $250! More information here.

Read more:

1. Busby SEO Test – Duplicate Content Debate One of the
2. Busby SEO Test – Adding Nofollow Without Changing Wordpress Codes Today I to
3. Busby SEO Test – Does Internal Linking Pattern Still Do The Trick? In other w
4. Busby SEO Test – Get A Share of My Victory! Up to $2500 for 10 A few mome

Some others do concern about duplicate content, but choose to battle plagiarism the other way. Instead of tracking scrapers, they concentrate on churning top notch content for their loyal readers. There are also a group of bloggers who make use of feed plugins to attach their copyright notice automatically on every feed. This method won’t stop scrapers from stealing content, but at least it will show web visitors the origin of the article.

I myself believe that Google is getting smarter in determining which page is the original publishing. Google uses a lot of metrics to determine a page’s rank and doesn’t depend solely on backlinks or similarity of a page one another.

In my participation in Busby SEO Test, I’m obligated to link to the original contest page. Since there are some of the contents I need to write based on the content on the contest page, I tailored my Busby SEO Test page differently from the contest page. I’m hoping that Google will see my page as a different page referencing to the contest page, not duplicating it.

Next, I’d love to hear what your opinion to this duplicate content issue. What do you do to protect your content? Or you’re not worried about it at all?

Review this article and get a chance to win $250! More information here.

Read more:

1. Busby SEO Test – Does Internal Linking Pattern Still Do The Trick? In other w
2. Busby SEO Test – Preserving Your PageRank In this ar
3. Busby SEO Test – Wordpress Hack to Make Your Site Loads Faster Take a loo
4. Busby SEO Test – Get A Share of My Victory! Up to $2500 for 10 A few mome

The SEO competition prize is divided among five winners with composition as follows:

• First Prize – $5,000
• Second Prize – $2,000
• Third Prize – $500
• Fourth Prize – $250
• Fifth Prize – $100

The winners will be decided based on whose entry hits the #1 spot on Google’s search result on “Busby SEO Test” keyword. I would be very happy to have mine as the winner .

However, it seems that I can’t outrank the other competitors solely relying to my own efforts. Therefore, I’d like to ask for your help to support my entry.

How can provide your support?

For the coming weeks, I will post techniques I use to push my entry to the best position in the SERP. What you can do to support my entry is by publishing a review of the articles containing the words “Busby SEO Test” in the title and link to the article you’re reviewing. For the updates list of articles, please view them at the bottom part of this post.

I would also try to make the best contribution to the article’s content so you won’t have to feel like you’re spreading “trash” to your friends and readers.

You can also link to the articles sitewide (on your sidebar, etc) but sitewide links will be weighted less than links in a blog post.

In the end of the period, if I make it to the top five, I will draw 5 to 10 people to get a share of my victory.

• If I win the first position, I will draw 10 winners to have $250 each to their Paypal account.
• If I win the second position, I will draw 10 winners to have $100 each to their Paypal account.
• If I win the third position, I will draw 10 winners to have $25 each to their Paypal account.
• If I win the fourth position, I will draw 5 winners to have $25 each to their Paypal account.
• If I win the fifth position, I will draw 5 winners to have $10 each to their Paypal account.
• So in general, any prize amount I win, I’ll split the half to be given to the lucky winners equally.

I hope that sounds good for you

So to recap, here are the summaries:

1. Review or sitewide link these articles (list will be updated when there are new articles, or you can subscribe via RSS or email to receive the latest article to be reviewed):
   • Busby SEO Test (please use the exact anchor text “Busby SEO Test”)
   • Busby SEO Test – Get A Share of My Victory! Up to $2500 for 10 (spread words about this contest)
   • Busby SEO Test – Duplicate Content Debate
   • Busby SEO Test – Preserving PageRank
   • Busby SEO Test – Wordpress Hack to Make Your Site Loads Faster
   • Busby SEO Test – Does Internal Linking Pattern Still Do The Trick?
   • Busby SEO Test – Adding Nofollow to Read More Link Without Changing Wordpress Codes
2. In your review, you’re free to speak your mind. If you think that my techniques are lame, I’d like to hear it. If they’re good, please let me know
3. Remember to email me at bukikiliem at gmail dot com mentioning which articles you have reviewed or linked, the URL and please use the same name and email address throughout the mails
4. Reviews will earn you 3 entries to the drawing
5. Sitewide links will earn you 1 entry to the drawing
6. You can also bookmark the articles listed above to let more people know about this contest, but social bookmarking won’t earn you any extra entries. However, it helps in pushing my entry further to the top if more people are reviewing the articles and it maximizes your chance to get a share of my prize. For quick bookmarking to 50 sites in 15 minutes, read this article: How These Semi-Automated Social Bookmarking Submitters Will Help You…
7. Entries are accepted until January 30, 2009. As long as your timezone is still showing 30 January, 2009, you’ll still eligible to enter
8. If I win the Busby SEO Test, winners will be announced 1-2 weeks after the Busby SEO Test winner announcement
9. Each winner will be a different person one another. If there’s an indication that two or more winners are the same person, I’ll divide the cash prize among the winners indicating the same person and draw for other winners
10. Hopefully there are no major changes to the rules, but if there are any, I’ll make sure you know about it

Best wishes for everyone!

Read more:

1. Busby SEO Test – Does Internal Linking Pattern Still Do The Trick? In other w
2. Busby SEO Test – Preserving Your PageRank In this ar
3. Busby SEO Test – Wordpress Hack to Make Your Site Loads Faster Take a loo
4. Busby SEO Test What is Bu

photo by Benjamin Ellis

Chris Garrett

• What were you doing before being addicted to the internet knowing that you were 20 back then?
• When did you start blogging and what made you started blogging?
• Looking back to the beginning of your blogging journey, what were the challenges when you started your blog?
• Do you think starting a blog nowadays is more difficult than years ago when you did?
• In that condition, what are the blogging survival tips that stand through the test of time?
• Are there still slices for new bloggers to make decent income from blogging?
• For those who have just started blogging, how important the Problogger Book is and how it will also help probloggers?
• How can we grow our blogs with your Authority Blogger course?

Mani Karthik

• What made you decide to start an SEO blog?
• From your view as an SEO consultant, which one new blogs need to focus on first? Quality content or SEO concerns?
• What do you think is the most misleading SEO myth?
• What is the everlasting ultimate SEO tip of all time?
• Having been dealing with SEO matters for a long time, has its techniques changed much since the day you started talking about the topic until present?
• Are there any differences between optimizing the site for Google and others like Yahoo! and MSN?
• Have you ever been tempted to apply blackhat SEO techniques? How did it turn out?
• You give a lot of SEO tips on DailySEOBlog.com, people can read them themselves and apply the techniques. What does your SEO service has more to offer?

Many bloggers (including us, perhaps?) may have these questions in their heads and now is the time to get some real answers! Find more about the interview and Bloghology and also… more answers from

• Guy Kawasaki
• Garry Conn
• John Cow
• Wendy Piersall
• and…Yaro Starak!

Read more:

1. Bloghology Hits the Blogosphere With A BIG BANG!   Ha
2. Start Blogging – 10 Must to Do Things After Creating a Blog After know
3. Submit Your Blogging Questions Using the New Google Moderator! Google has
4. Blogging – Blog Hijacks I received

The pages to be considered, where and how you can nofollow the links are as follows. Basically you need to find a code which says a href and then add rel=”nofollow” between the “a” and “href”:

• the links to your own homepage – usually they can be found in the header.php or footer.php and embedded in a code looks like this:

<a class="on" href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/" rel="nofollow">Make Money Blogging</a>

All you need to do is adding rel=”nofollow” like the above to block the link.

• your feed links – find any codes that says links to your feed and add rel=”nofollow” in similar manner as above.
• your date archive links – you can either delete the links if most of your blog’s content is not time based, or follow the instructions using a plugin below.
• page navigation links – usually shows up in your index.php file, look for the phrase “Previous Entry” or “Next Entry” or anything depends on your theme. Add a rel=”nofollow” between “a” and “href” within the code.
• links to enlarged pictures – same as above, add the rel=”nofollow” to the linking code.
• commentator names – this is by default nofollowed

To add nofollow to links beyond this point requires modifications to your original WordPress script. Please back up your WordPress files before comitting the mods since I can not be held responsible for any errors that may occur. There’s also a WordPress plugin that allows you to do nothing at all to WordPress files, but it requires a little bit more coding knowledge, though. I’ll ahow you right after this section.

Find the functions within the following files and add rel=”nofollow” between every “a” and “href” inside the function:

• wp_generate_tag_cloud, get_the_category_list, get_the_term_list within the file /wp-includes/category-template.php – this will add nofollow to tag cloud and category links.

• edit_post_link within link-template.php – this will add nofollow to “Edit this post” link if you’re logged in as your blog’s admin.

• the_author_posts_link within wp-includes/author-template.php – this will add nofollow to author links. An easier method is available if your blog only has one author is to delete all the links referring to the author’s page.

• comments_popup_link within wp-includes/comment-template.php – this will add nofollow to links within the comment section.

Now, I’ll show you the plugin Stephan Miller told me which enables you to add nofollow without having to touch the WordPress original files at all. First, please download the Add Link Attribute plugin and activate it. According to the instruction, you need to replace the function calling the linking codes within your blog’s theme with the plugin’s own function.

For example, I’ve done nofollowing my pages link using the plugin. What I did was, I looked for the codes to display the pages links on my header. I found them inside header.php. It originally looked like this:

<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>

Then, I replaced the codes with the plugin’s function:

<?php add_link_attr('wp_list_pages', 'title_li=', 'rel="nofollow"'); ?>

Now I’ll try to explain what to be included within the code and how it can be applied for other functions.

First, the original code from the function looked like this:

<?php add_link_attr('function', 'arguments', 'attribute', imgtag); ?>

Then, you need to alter the word “function” with the function you want to replace. In my case, it was the function displaying the pages links, which was wp_list_pages. How can I know which functions to replace? Easy. Look for them inside your theme codes.

Therefore, after knowing which fucntion to be replaced, the plugin code will be like

<?php add_link_attr('wp_list_pages', 'arguments', 'attribute', imgtag); ?>

Next, you need to replace the word “arguments” with the value usually accompanying the function you want to replace. The value is written within the brackets after the original function’s name. In my case the function wp_list_pages was originally written wp_list_pages(’title_li=’). That makes the plugin code appears like

<?php add_link_attr('wp_list_pages', 'title_li=', 'attribute', imgtag); ?>

Not so difficult, isn’t it? Further, the “attribute” word is where you write any attributes you want to add. Since we’re talking about adding nofollows to links, then the “attribute” will be replaced with rel=”nofollow” so it looks like

<?php add_link_attr('wp_list_pages', 'title_li=', 'rel="nofollow"'); ?>

That leaves one more word in the plugin’s function to be replaced, that is imgtag. Since the instructions says:

imgtag

(boolean) Insert attribute(s) into img/image tag (TRUE), or into a/anchor tag (FALSE). Defaults to FALSE.

and we’ve got nothing to do with it, we can leave the value empty. Finally, the final form of the code to add nofollow to pages links will be:

<?php add_link_attr('wp_list_pages', 'title_li=', 'rel="nofollow"'); ?>

For more explanations and examples of this great plugin, please go to the plugin’s homepage.

I guess that’s all and I hope you find the tutorial useful. Drop any of your questions below and I’ll try my best to assist you.

Read more:

1. Busby SEO Test – Adding Nofollow Without Changing Wordpress Codes Today I to
2. Blogging – Dividing Your Post into Pages in WordPress I can
3. Blogging – Following Commentators’ Links How do yo
4. Busby SEO Test – Preserving Your PageRank In this ar

photo by Jaye_Elle

Whatever your opinion to PageRank , the higher it is, the better it will effect your blog. Especially if we concern much about PR, we have been busy in our effort to get the highest boost of PageRank in the next update . A lot of effort has gone into it, hours of creating contents, dropping comments, introducing ourselves and articles which probbly spend numerous countless nights.

However, let us not forget that in order to make those link building attempts effective, we need to tweak some parts of our blog as well (some of us may find more things to optimize than others .

I’m talking about how your blog/site carries and distributes link juice it receives from another blog/site. There’s one matter you need to know:

patch the holes and pass on the flows

photo by vrogy

Imagine there are 100 dofollow links pointing to your front page. And on the page, you link to your individual articles, categories, date archives, tag clouds, policy page, and of course your feed subscription link . Between all those pages, which one will be the most suitable to rank the highest on the search engine result pages (SERP)? I’m sure you agree that it’s the individual post pages. You don’t need your policy page to rank #1 on SERP more than your featured post, do you?

You can start re-arranging how your blog handles links by adding nofollow to internal pages you don’t need them to appear on search engines. Or at least, you don’t need them to rank high. Internal links to consider are :

• the link to your own homepage – people say the more links pointing to a certain page, the higher the page will rank. It’s true…if the link comes from a different domain
  Update: I apologize for the rushing statement above. Internal linking does have a significant contribution for a page’s rank. Even so, you still have the option to nofollow your homepage link in order to pass more rank to other pages. But please keep in mind that it may lead to a drop of your homepage’s PR.
• your feed link – some of you may disallow your feed to be indexed. This way, there’s no use to link them with dofollow since search engines won’t list them. If no one will see it, no use to dress it. If for any reasons you allow indexing of your feed, nofollow is still needed. Unless you want to generously flow your hard earned gold links to Feedburner or Feedblitz which they already abundantly have.
• your tag cloud, date and category based archive – I set my robots.txt to block search engines from indexing those pages. That’s why, for the same reasons as above, links to them don’t need to be dofollowed.
• your policy page – Simply put, there’s still a lot of thirsty new articles gasping for fresh link juice.
• your sitemap page – You don’t need to have your sitemap indexed if you have submitted it to search engines. Less pages indexed means you can feed more articles the dofollow links.
• links to your authors page – Some of you may need the authors page to get a good SERP. Some who don’t can no-follow these links.
• links to edit your post – Definitely no-follow in my opinion
• links to categories archive – It also depends on if you’d like the categories archive page to hit the #1 page of Google or prioritizing the individual posts. I myself prefer my individual posts rather than categories archive pages.
• links to the comment section – It’s useful for navigation, but I suggest to address them no-follow.
• page numbers navigation – If your categories archive is divided into multiple pages and you don’t follow links to your category archives, then you need to follow it up by no-following page number links.
• subscribe to comments links – Usually they point to your feed service. But if they go to your own feed address, you can no-follow them for the same reason as #2
• links to enlarged pictures – Some of you may value pictures higher for your topic/niche, so the decision depends on your purposes with those pictures.
• blogroll…? – The decision is completely up to you . But don’t let them know what you’re doing
• links to popular pages – like google.com, facebook.com, you name them. Again, the decision is yours. If you feel like giving them a credit, do so.
• commentator names – Depends on whether you’re following your commentators or not, you can always switch the to no-follow/do-follow.

Before looking for more links to no-follow, I’d like to remind you of links you SHOULD follow . Not much, they are supposed to be your theme author link, your blogroll (depends on you), links your posts are referring to (if any) and sites/blogs inspire your posts.

If you would like to know what your PageRank will be on the next update, you can go to this PageRank Calculator to estimate the coming value of your PageRank . The tool calculates the result by processing your current PageRank, your inbound and outbound links. Therefore, you can plan your link building more strategically. With the PageRank Calculator it is easier to target a specific PageRank value for a given page as mentioned in micro managing your PageRank .

click on the image to view

Hopefully before applying further link-building strategy , you can provide some time to analyze your link flows and optimize them to get the best results.

Update:

• Stephan Miller suggested me two awesome plugins to add nofollow to links in archives pages and another one which will allow you to code “nofollow” into normal wordpress functions like for category list widgets and page list widgets. Check his comment in # 4 below.
• For a guide on how to add the nofollow tag to your links, please go to the Adding Nofollow to Any Links article.
• There’s another point of view by Mani Karthik regarding how PageRank juice is distributed. In his quick SEO tip, he explained that the PR value of the giving page is not affected by how many links the page links to. Instead, the receiving pages are the ones affected. While my article and his are having a different opinion on how linking influences a certain page, both of them show you that PageRank value is dynamic and transferrable. Therefore, you can use both articles as reasons to manage your PR.

Read more:

1. Busby SEO Test – Preserving Your PageRank In this ar
2. Blogging – Dividing Your Post into Pages in WordPress I can
3. Adding NoFollow to Any Links Generated by WordPress This is a
4. Resolving The Feed Too Large Error Just now I

Search Engine:

Do you know that Google loves spam? – Find out the truth and the reasons behind it.

Blogging Tips:

Pay attention to 10 crucial points to make a killing blog post

Has your pool of ideas run dry? Here’s how to find a topic for your next blog post

Planning to guest blog? Make sure not to waste your time waiting for reactions

Get millions of traffic… well, not that much actually (but still worth the effort) with a comment

11 simple tips to write catchy articles… that you don’t know!

Niche Marketing:

Stuck with keyword research? Why not let your competitors do the hard work?

And here’s how to find high paying niches for Adsense

Social Media:

Die hard user of social medias? Using them for marketing? Get your hands on 35 Must-Read Articles for Social Media Marketers

Read more:

1. Weekly Link Share on HomeBiz Resource This is th
2. The Best and Free Internet Marketing Ebook This artic
3. Start Blogging – 10 Must to Do Things After Creating a Blog After know
4. One Time Contest – Cyber Easter Egg Hunt from Caroline Middlebrook Contest Li

• Using The Wordpress Discussion Filters – Fighting Comment Spam – Jeremy’s methods of reducing spam comments using Wordpress’ discussion filter system via moderation and blacklisting. You’ll see how powerful the feature is.

• Top 10 social media misconceptions – Noah Elkin compiles 10 social media misconceptions and corresponding implications for your search marketing campaign.

• 5 Must Have Firefox add-ons for Social Media Addicts – Uzair lists 5 Firefox add-ons which save him a lot of time and also enhanced his social media experience. If they work for him, at least one of them must be doing the same for you.

• Top 10 Javascript slideshows, carousels and sliders – 10 cross-platform, absolutely stunning slideshows, carousels and sliders, based on Mootools, JQuery, Yahoo! User Interface, and Script.aculo.us. Eye catching scripts to display your content.

• Quick SEO Tips – Can linking to other sites harm my Page Rank? – Mani Karthik adresses many bloggers worries about having a long blogroll’s impact on SEO.
• How To Get to the Front Page of Digg – 6 Ingredients of a Successful Digg Campaign – We’ve seen many tips to be on Digg’s front page. But reading another 7 (his last tip is Don’t become obsessed with Digg) from Darren won’t hurt. Not only he listed them, but clear explanation were also given. Worth the stumble…and Digg of course!
• A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images – Skellie explains the types of photos copyright in Flickr and a guide to find the photos to spice up your blog posts.

Read more:

1. Belated Weekly Link Share – More Interesting Stuffs The previo
2. Digg Toolbar Launched! Digg , a p
3. PageRank Update – HomeBiz Resource Rakes 4 from N/A! I was alar
4. CoComment – Integrated Tracking of Your Wide Spread Comments How do you

Now, after figuring out that undoing all the changes didn’t work, I started to look for help at the FeedBurner Help Group. I learned that there are two ways to reduce your feed’s size.

1. Through your feedburner account
2. From your dashboard options

Through your feedburner account

You can add a variable after your original feed address. Here’s from the group directly:

1. Sign in to your FeedBurner account.
2. Click the title of your FeedBurner feed on the My Feeds page.
3. On the feed management page that appears, click the Edit Feed Details… link just below your feed’s title.
4. In the Original Feed Address field, change the address listed there from an example like the following:

   Code:

   http://myblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml
   OR
   http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

   to the following format:

   Code:

   http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=3

   (Note that max-results sets the number of posts you want to have appear in your FeedBurner feed. Any integer value between 1 and 500 is permitted.)

5. Click Save Feed Details. Your changes are immediately applied and FeedBurner re-burns the newly shortened (or lengthened) feed.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me. But try it, maybe it works for you.

The other way to the feed troubleshooting is by reducing the number of items displayed under the “Publicize” tab, in the “BuzzBoost” section on the left. If it fails, change from displaying full feed to just summary feed.

From your dashboard options

If you prefer to stay with full feed to give the most to your readers (or if the above doesn’t work either), go to your WordPress dashboard, head to “Settings”/”Options” | Reading. Look for the setting labeled “Syndication feeds show the most recent” and reduce the number. Mine was 50 and currently I set it to 25…Thank God IT WORKS!

How feeds do you display? Have you got any feed problems? Hoh did you solve the problem?

You may also interested in the following troubleshooting:

• Your blog’s theme changes itself. What’s the solution?
• Another feed problem. No feeds were displayed.
• Someone broke through my front page and replaced its content!

Read more:

1. Resolving The Feed Too Large Error Just now I
2. Using 404 Error Page for SEO Benefits This artic
3. Blog Monetization – Bidvertiser Feed To Be Used With WordPress and FeedBurner After laun
4. Blogging – Make Sure You Know What You’re Doing! As a few d

Now how those links managed to reside within my blog, I don’t know for sure. But Andrew Rickmann suggested me to google for “wordpress security scanner ” to find what might have caused it and how to prevent it happen in the future.

As the result, here are the pre-emptive procedures I commenced to harden my WordPress installation . You might want to see if there are anything you may also need to do before similar or worse infiltration happens to your blog.

• I changed my password – Password crackings is one of the methods used to hijack blogs . And if they got through, the worst possibility is they could replace your password with theirs so you wouldn’t have control of your blog. And the only option left is reinstalling your blog and hopefully you have a backup of your blog’s database. Here’s a good suggestion from WordPress on how your password shouldn’t be . As a result, my password is now three times stronger (not longer) and more varied.

do not use your own name for your password, do not use a dictionary word (from any language) for your password, do not use a 4 character string of numbers as your password. Your goal with your password is to make the search space as large as possible, so using numbers and varying capitalization all make it more difficult, statistically, to brute force a password.

• In case someone is using brute force to break in, I already had the login lock down WordPress plugin installed, which locks down login function for a period of time when there are certain numbers of failed login attempt within a range of time. The plugin also records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt.
• I had my plugins upgraded – Similar to WordPress installation, plugins need to be updated over time decrease blog security risks. Some of them need write acces to WordPress files and directories. This can be exploited as a security hole. When a plugin’s upgrade is available, install it immediately and delete the plugins you don’t use .
• I restrict access to my wp-admin directory – I did this by adding a .htaccess file inside my wp-admin directory and made the directory accessible only from a certain IP address. Here’s the code I used:

order deny,allow
allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx # This is your static IP
deny from all

• As well as wp-admin directory, access to my wp-config.php has also been blocked . Add the following codes to the .htaccess file inside the wp-admin directory:

<Files wp-config.php>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from All
</Files>

• Everytime WordPress release a new version upgrade, they list blog security holes found in the previous version. Crackers can take advantage over the information to break into outdated WordPress blog. There are two ways to prevent this. One is by upgrading your WordPress blog ASAP , or hiding the information of your current WordPress version (or do them both). WordPress version is usually displayed on blog footers, so you may want to replace with just “Powered by WordPress”. You can also view the current version by viewing a page’s source code. It’s the result of what’s coded within header.php , usually with the remark “<!– leave this for stats –> “. To disguise your WordPress version, simply install and activate the Replace WP-Version plugin. It will replace your WordPress version with a random number in case someone is trying to view your page’s source.
• Try typing http://www.homebiz.bukiki.com/wp-content/plugins/ . Without a blank index.html file inside my plugins directory , anybody can view the plugins I use easily. The same thing can happen to your blog! Check each directory if it displays its content when people type their URL and if it does, add a blank index.html file inside the directory. DO NOT add an index.php file. Why? See the comment below. It doesn’t have to be blank though, you can write anything you want like “Beware of dogs!” Don’t forget to put it inside your themes directory also.
• In case you think you need a more concrete-solid protection against unauthorized access, you can install wp-scanner plugin to get your list of security risks on your blog.

The blog breach could happened maybe because I was putting security not as important as content, design and SEO. While they might be the King , Queen and Queen Mother , I musn’t forget that there’s also the Gurkha .

There you are. Let me know if there’s any problem after performing these steps (I wish there weren’t any).

Hopefully you won’t have to experience the same like I did (twice!). Or if you did, maybe you have something to share

Other sources for securing your WordPress blog:

• Hardening WordPress
• Is your Wordpress blog hacked? Why not upgrade to the latest version?
• How To Secure Your Wordpress Blog
• Wordpress exploit: we been hit by hidden spam link injection

Read more:

1. Quick Blog Comments Moderation from Your Desktop Last night
2. PHP Speedy For WordPress’ Caching Plugins Alternative Caching pl
3. Blogging – Unwanted Theme Change Resolved? It has
4. Adding NoFollow to Any Links Generated by WordPress This is a

I’ve a friend who had an accident six years ago, while he was carried by his friend on a motorcycle. Suddenly, a truck hit them hard from behind and dragged my friend for 20 meters and the truck’s tire ended up crushing his thighs. Not just that, some ribs got pushed upward and needed to be operated.

The accident paralyzed his legs. He cannot move them, and of course, walk. A couple of weeks ago, he discovered that one of his hip bones (I don’t know what doctors name them) strucked out of his skin (in a slowly manner, of course. Not like those alien movies ) and once again he needed a surgery. This time, it caused him barely sit at all. If he used to use a wheel chair, now all he can do is lying since he is not allowed to sit for a long time. In addition, due to broken veins and nerve systems, his legs shrink, darken and easily bleed if bumped to even a soft surface like car leather seats.

Having his life changed drastically only in days, losing parts of the body people can see, caused him a sudden unconfident where he became sensitive to people he doesn’t know. He is 27 years old and meeting new people including girls and women seems to be one of the situations he must face with his current situation. Often he refuse to meet up new friends because he thinks they make fun of him or feel disgust in their thoughts.

What does it have to do with Make Money Online?

Focus on what you have

I told you that my friend is paralyzed half his body down. But he still has his arms, hands, eyes, ears work very well. And the most important, his brain. Losing his legs will make him able to do only 8,000 things from 10,000 things he could if he hadn’t had the accident. But, 8,000 is better than doing nothing at all.

• Your blog may not have the best design, but it turns out that you’re doing good at making articles, telling them to your readers and enchant them with your style of writing.
• You may find your writing skill is fair. So, you can present your valuable opinions that will distract people’s attention from your style of writing. Give them your own compelling thoughts and readers will care less about your grammar and verbal skills.
• You do well with graphics and visuals. If you found out that you’re more into designs and layouts, you can make your skill a business. This might be implemented in offering services for bloggers or companies to do the designs for their online identity. Maybe this means leaving your early intention to make money blogging. But in my opinion, before we become someone who knows precisely 100% what’s the best for us, we should write down our plans with pencils instead of pens.
• You’re good at analyzing data. Looks like you can provide a good service extracting information from a various range of data. SEO is related to analyzing traffic data, discovering what kind of content people like, how readers find your site, how’s their navigating characteristics, where they usually click and what makes them interested in interacting more with your site. If you find yourself good in reading such patterns and making conclusions, you can start offering your service on how people can maximize their site’s potential.

Simply accept what you don’t have

No blog is a perfect blog. A blog with good thoughts may have a design makes people prefer to read the content through RSS feed. Some others make it difficult to search for old posts while some update less frequently but deliver quality content when they post.

How to keep survive for months and years? We should realize what we’re lack on and more focus to what we do better. We shouldn’t concern much on “If I can make a better design and post everyday, I can make my bounce rate as low as 0%!”.

No, we should do it one at a time. If we’re better at writing articles, we’ll post regularly as often as possible, keeping the design matter away for some time. If we already make it a habit and there’s eventually some time to set a new design, then we can think about it. But if we’re not there yet, it’s better to maximize what we have instead of worrying about our weaknesses.

There are so much other talents hidden on every each of bloggers. Keep developing on things you find yourself good at and never be distracted to what people think of what you’re not very good at. Focus on and maximize what you do best.

Those are the things I got about how we should deal with things we’re not very good at. Have you any other experience you’d like to share? How do you treat your weak spots?

Technorati Tags: blogging

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4. Should We Stop Reading Blogs to Blog? Should we?

On a Make Money Online blog like this one, hundreds of posts related to the topic could be written. With a bi-daily posting frequency (for example ) and 20 excerpts being displayed on the main page, a post makes its appearance for only 40 days before it goes to the monthly or category archive.

Unless the post is featured, commented mostly, or you’re using the Similar Posts plug-in, it’ll remain hidden inside the archive link. Unless the post is armed with a top-notch on-page SEO, it’ll be discovered on the 50th page of SERP.

So, is there anything else to do in order to make your precious articles at least, a lot easier to be found?

The answer is maximizing the use of your category names and tags. Since older posts can be reached through category links, they need to be as appealing as possible to your readers.

Keep it relevant

The first thing leads to a better category management is to focus on your blog’s topic. Before thinking of posting an article, you should decide whether it’s related or not. If it isn’t, don’t do it. Posting articles not related to your blog’s theme will likely lead to excessive categorizing that will ruin your blog and confuse your readers.

Category names are teasers for what’s inside.

Categories are sub-sub theme for your blog’s theme. On a MMO blog, categories could be make money blogging, domain parking, website flipping, affiliate marketing, GPT programs, paid reviews and many else. However, on a blog that contents are more date oriented (news, personal diary, update on happenings), categories should be time based to make it easier for readers to find posts. Decide this from your readers’ point of view. How are they going to find your posts easier? Whether it is date or content based categorization.

When you’ve figure out how to group your posts, you need to pick a representative name for each category. The one describes its content, catches your readers’ attention and gives a clue of what is inside. Be a visitor of your own blog and make sure you don’t misguide yourself with the category titles.

In my own case, back then, I named my categories:

• blogging
• online freelancing
• GPT programs
• contests
• for advertisers
• domain registrations
• web hosting
• tips
• news and rumors
• other interests

It was obvious enough to found out what were inside the link “blogging”, since the blog has clearly stated that it’s a MMO blog. However, the new method of naming the category makes a more certain thought of what each category holds inside.

Now, I name them:

• Earn Money…
  • …blogging
  • …online freelancing
  • …GPT programs
  • …contests
• Top tips to…
  • …create some buzz!
  • …domain registrations
  • …web hosting
• And some other…
  • …general tips
  • …news and rumors
  • …various interests

They are still on the same order, but now I add headers to clearly state that this link will lead you to “Make Money Blogging” tips, “Make Money Winning Contests” or “Some Tips on Generating Buzz”. This way people are more certain of what they’re going to read.

What is the best for your blog? Think like the reader, not the author.

Less is more

Another thing you need to pay attention to is, categories are made to simplify searching of your articles. They are called categories and not post lists for a reason.

To avoid unnecessary long list of categories, you can limit yourself from posting unrelated posts to your blog’s niche. The other way is to look at your category list. One category should not fit into others. For example, if I had two categories, name them “Make Money Blogging” and “SEO Tips”, I would merge them under “Make Money Blogging” because my blog discusses “Make Money Blogging” tips and SEO is one of the ways to improve your blog to make more money.

Alternatively, if I had “Make Money Blogging” and “Make Money with GPT Programs”, I could leave them as they were. Because “Make Money Blogging” is totally a different way to make money from GPT programs.

I know that sometimes we want to add new categories so badly because we don’t think a post fits well to any categories. The solution is, pick up any category describes the post best and add some tags to your post.

“Make Money Blogging” category can have articles tagged with “AdSense”, “SEO”, “WordPress” but not “AdWords”. Because in my opinion, AdWords is something you do outside your blog and your category title is “Make Money Blogging”.

So, whenever you feel like adding a new category, think of adding tags first. They are useful as an extension to your categories but in a much tidier way and looks that will please your readers’ eye.

As the final effort to make your content easily available to your readers, you can always have a search form. Search forms further expands the benefits of categories and tags. People use search forms to search articles based on tags you didn’t think of.

A good example of tagging, probably, you won’t find it here. Since when I wrote the article, I haven’t done anything to tidy up my tags. But another live blog of mine is applying what I’ve learned about categories and tags.

Please visit CahKontes.com. It’s a blog about contests in my local language. There, I demonstrate the use of categories and tags to make it easier for people to found contents. If you care for a little explanation, here we go:

Cah Kontes’ posts are mainly time based, since contests have deadlines, I use months as one of category names. See the “april 2008″ link inside the red circle. Clicking this will display contests end on April 2008.

Contests also have prizes, and prizes are varied. From cash, ad spots, reviews, entrecard credits, cool stuffs, tees, and many more (the sky is the limit ). If I’m going to make categories out of them, they’ll make an awful list longer than the content itself. So I decided to have these parameters as categories:

• the amount of cash given as prize
• the grand total value of the prizes
• the amount of entrecard credits as prize
• when the contest ends
• whether the contest is periodical or not

So, inside the red circle you can see “$51-$500″. Clicking on it will display contests throwing $51-$500 cash prize out. While “GT $501-$2000″ means contests giving away prizes worth $501-$2000 in total. John Cow’s XBOX 360 Elite’s contest falls into this category. What about the “101-1000″ category? I use it to group up contests giving away 101-1000 Entrecard credits.

What about the other prizes like ad spots, reviews, entrecard credits, cool stuffs, tees? What if someone want to look for contests having those as prize? Easy! I also tag contests with prizes they have. So people can also browse through tags to find kinds of contests they want. But make sure you tag posts consistently. If you use t-shirt for tags, use t-shirt all the time instead of changing between t-shirt, tee or tshirt. They will all appear on the tag cloud and each of them will display different results.

I put those tags below the red circle. From the picture, you can see that people can browse contests which giving out cash (uang), hosting, domain and cool stuffs (barang keren) as prizes.

The final assistance to find posts is by the search form (blue circle). It is located below the tag cloud and people can search anything by the keywords I probably haven’t thought of…

Finally, there are other methods you can use to make your content accessible through any ways, like SEO, linkbaits, etc. But they all work outside your blog. When people get to your blog, having a proper categories and tags is the best way to guide them from inside your blog. That’s why this post falls into “Earn Money Blogging” category.

What is your thought about categorizing your posts? Does important to you? What problems do you have in re-categorizing your content?

Related post on Problogger: How to Choose Categories for Your Blog

Technorati Tags: category name,category tips,a good category,blogging,tagging

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1. How to Use Tags and Categories Properly This is a
2. Irrelevant Posts and Categories! Maybe You Like Them, Your Readers Certainly Don’t Irrelevant
3. How to Display Only Posts from Certain Categories on Your Mainpage and Feeds The hack w
4. Small Fish Big Money – It’s Not Just About Great Content “If you un

For every post you made, I’m sure you want them visible to your readers for years to come. But with new articles every day, how to make older posts keep getting readers?

On a Make Money Online blog like this one, hundreds of posts related to the topic could be written. With a bi-daily posting frequency (for example ) and 20 excerpts being displayed on the main page, a post makes its appearance for only 40 days before it goes to the monthly or category archive.

Unless the post is featured, commented mostly, or you’re using the Similar Posts plug-in, it’ll remain hidden inside the archive link. Unless the post is armed with a top-notch on-page SEO, it’ll be discovered on the 50th page of SERP.

So, is there anything else to do in order to make your precious articles at least, a lot easier to be found?

The answer is maximizing the use of your category names and tags. Since older posts can be reached through category links, they need to be as appealing as possible to your readers.

Keep it relevant

The first thing leads to a better category management is to focus on your blog’s topic. Before thinking of posting an article, you should decide whether it’s related or not. If it isn’t, don’t do it. Posting articles not related to your blog’s theme will likely lead to excessive categorizing that will ruin your blog and confuse your readers.

Category names are teasers for what’s inside.

Categories are sub-sub theme for your blog’s theme. On a MMO blog, categories could be make money blogging, domain parking, website flipping, affiliate marketing, GPT programs, paid reviews and many else. However, on a blog that contents are more date oriented (news, personal diary, update on happenings), categories should be time based to make it easier for readers to find posts. Decide this from your readers’ point of view. How are they going to find your posts easier? Whether it is date or content based categorization.

When you’ve figure out how to group your posts, you need to pick a representative name for each category. The one describes its content, catches your readers’ attention and gives a clue of what is inside. Be a visitor of your own blog and make sure you don’t misguide yourself with the category titles.

In my own case, back then, I named my categories:

• blogging
• online freelancing
• GPT programs
• contests
• for advertisers
• domain registrations
• web hosting
• tips
• news and rumors
• other interests

It was obvious enough to found out what were inside the link “blogging”, since the blog has clearly stated that it’s a MMO blog. However, the new method of naming the category makes a more certain thought of what each category holds inside.

Now, I name them:

• Earn Money…
  • …blogging
  • …online freelancing
  • …GPT programs
  • …contests
• Top tips to…
  • …create some buzz!
  • …domain registrations
  • …web hosting
• And some other…
  • …general tips
  • …news and rumors
  • …various interests

They are still on the same order, but now I add headers to clearly state that this link will lead you to “Make Money Blogging” tips, “Make Money Winning Contests” or “Some Tips on Generating Buzz”. This way people are more certain of what they’re going to read.

What is the best for your blog? Think like the reader, not the author.

Less is more

Another thing you need to pay attention to is, categories are made to simplify searching of your articles. They are called categories and not post lists for a reason.

To avoid unnecessary long list of categories, you can limit yourself from posting unrelated posts to your blog’s niche. The other way is to look at your category list. One category should not fit into others. For example, if I had two categories, name them “Make Money Blogging” and “SEO Tips”, I would merge them under “Make Money Blogging” because my blog discusses “Make Money Blogging” tips and SEO is one of the ways to improve your blog to make more money.

Alternatively, if I had “Make Money Blogging” and “Make Money with GPT Programs”, I could leave them as they were. Because “Make Money Blogging” is totally a different way to make money from GPT programs.

I know that sometimes we want to add new categories so badly because we don’t think a post fits well to any categories. The solution is, pick up any category describes the post best and add some tags to your post.

“Make Money Blogging” category can have articles tagged with “AdSense”, “SEO”, “WordPress” but not “AdWords”. Because in my opinion, AdWords is something you do outside your blog and your category title is “Make Money Blogging”.

So, whenever you feel like adding a new category, think of adding tags first. They are useful as an extension to your categories but in a much tidier way and looks that will please your readers’ eye.

As the final effort to make your content easily available to your readers, you can always have a search form. Search forms further expands the benefits of categories and tags. People use search forms to search articles based on tags you didn’t think of.

A good example of tagging, probably, you won’t find it here. Since when I wrote the article, I haven’t done anything to tidy up my tags. But another live blog of mine is applying what I’ve learned about categories and tags.

Please visit CahKontes.com. It’s a blog about contests in my local language. There, I demonstrate the use of categories and tags to make it easier for people to found contents. If you care for a little explanation, here we go:

Cah Kontes’ posts are mainly time based, since contests have deadlines, I use months as one of category names. See the “april 2008″ link inside the red circle. Clicking this will display contests end on April 2008.

Contests also have prizes, and prizes are varied. From cash, ad spots, reviews, entrecard credits, cool stuffs, tees, and many more (the sky is the limit ). If I’m going to make categories out of them, they’ll make an awful list longer than the content itself. So I decided to have these parameters as categories:

• the amount of cash given as prize
• the grand total value of the prizes
• the amount of entrecard credits as prize
• when the contest ends
• whether the contest is periodical or not

So, inside the red circle you can see “$51-$500″. Clicking on it will display contests throwing $51-$500 cash prize out. While “GT $501-$2000″ means contests giving away prizes worth $501-$2000 in total. John Cow’s XBOX 360 Elite’s contest falls into this category. What about the “101-1000″ category? I use it to group up contests giving away 101-1000 Entrecard credits.

What about the other prizes like ad spots, reviews, entrecard credits, cool stuffs, tees? What if someone want to look for contests having those as prize? Easy! I also tag contests with prizes they have. So people can also browse through tags to find kinds of contests they want. But make sure you tag posts consistently. If you use t-shirt for tags, use t-shirt all the time instead of changing between t-shirt, tee or tshirt. They will all appear on the tag cloud and each of them will display different results.

I put those tags below the red circle. From the picture, you can see that people can browse contests which giving out cash (uang), hosting, domain and cool stuffs (barang keren) as prizes.

The final assistance to find posts is by the search form (blue circle). It is located below the tag cloud and people can search anything by the keywords I probably haven’t thought of…

Finally, there are other methods you can use to make your content accessible through any ways, like SEO, linkbaits, etc. But they all work outside your blog. When people get to your blog, having a proper categories and tags is the best way to guide them from inside your blog. That’s why this post falls into “Earn Money Blogging” category.

What is your thought about categorizing your posts? Does important to you? What problems do you have in re-categorizing your content?

Related post on Problogger: How to Choose Categories for Your Blog

Technorati Tags: category name,category tips,a good category,blogging,tagging

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4. Internet Marketing and Blogging Tips by MrJavo.com Today

On my previous post about irrelevant posts, I mentioned the technique I use to give my readers an authority over off topic posts. Using the technique, they won’t have to counter any posts fall outside their concern.

Enough jabbering, here are the hacks I use:

• excluding posts from certain categories, they’ll be invisible on the main page and feed updates: put this code inside your functions.php.

function myFilter($query) {
if ($query->is_feed || $query->is_home) {
$query->set('cat','-151,-200,-520');
}

return $query;
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts','myFilter');

The code above works by eliminating posts from the category ID 151 and 200. You may want to change the values into your own category ID. Keep the dash (-) sign, by the way.
If you want to exclude the posts from one of either the main page or the feed, you can alter the code which says:

($query->is_feed || $query->is_home)

into this one for excluding the posts on the mainpage:

($query->is_home)

or this one, to make the posts invisible via feed updates:

($query->is_feed)

• making off topic posts displayed separately. As you can see on my mainpage, there is a section called “Various Buzz” containing posts unrelated to make money online tips. I group them below my relevant posts so that my readers won’t have to see them between relevant posts, but the “Various Buzz” posts are still visible for those who want to read them. In order to make that happen, first I made them invisible on the mainpage using the codes above, and then I added this block of code in my index.php:

<center><h2>Various Buzz</h2></center><br>

<strong></strong>

have_posts()) : $my_query-&gt;the_post(); ?&gt;
<h2><a href="%3C?php%20the_permalink%28%29%20?%3E" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to &lt;?php the_title(); ?&gt;"></a></h2>

<p class="postinfo"><!--?php the_author_posts_link(); ?--> On  |  | </p>
<div class="entry">
<br><hr>
</div>

The core of the script has been bolded. That part should be written exactly. You can modify the values according to your own category ID (cat) and the number of posts you want to display (showposts). From the code above, you can see that I’m displaying 5 posts from category ID 151.
The other part of the code is just giving you a picture of where you can put the code. Since I want to display them on my mainpage, I put them on my index.php. Should you need to show them on the sidebar, you can place them on your sidebar.php.

Now, I hope that small slice of hack could do you and your readers some good!

Some codes contributed by zeo.unic.net.my

Technorati Tags: exclude post from a category,blogging,group posts in a category

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Tina Su from Think Simple Now and Henrik Edberg of Positivity Blog was interviewed by Daniel Scocco. The result was a very interesting review, where they both have things in common lead them to reach a large number of audience.

These are the practical lessons that have been said repeatedly, yet proven useful:

• provide valuable content, and do it consistently.
• use a unique design or idea or concept to help you differentiate from the others.
• don’t be over obsessed with ranks like PR and Alexa. Allocate your energy more towards providing priceless content.
• be persistent and commit to quality.

Those are the points most bloggers need to put their best effort in to. However, there is something unusual both Tina and Henrik don’t do on their journey blogging.

Question: How many RSS feeds do you track daily?

Tina: Zero. I occasionally will visit Zenhabits.net, but that’s about it. I don’t really read blogs.

Henrik: None. I visit a few blogs maybe once a week.

What?!? That’s right…! They barely read blogs! How’s that possible? They don’t read blogs but they have thousands reading theirs! So now we can delete all our RSS subscriptions?

I say “NO!”. Here’s what I have in mind..

Look at their blog’s topic. Tina’ blog is focusing on creativity, clarity and happiness. While Henrik’s talks about career to productivity and life hacks. Those are the things about life and life itself can be fully experienced if you go out and interact with as many people as possible.

Furthermore, socializing offline allows you to have a physical contact with others, look at them in the eye, watching people’s expressions and many more than just sitting down, skimming articles and even looking at each other through a webcam. For that reason, I don’t think they need to read many blogs to find sources of what they’re going to write about.

How do they reach thousands of subscribers then? I guess mainly it’s their content. Their topic is interesting for most of the people looking for solutions to their problems in life. Plus, the way they compose each article grabs and retains readers to the end of every post.

So I guess it’s clear why they don’t read blogs, yet managed to establish a strong community base. It’s because blogs are not their main source of idea and thought, and second, unless they are gifted, they have developed their writing skills over time.

Now What?

If you source your information from blogs, I suggest to stick to tracking feeds. Beside life itself, blogs can still contribute great suggestions to jolt your brain for post ideas. Also, by reading blog posts, you can also enhance your writing proficiency to appeal more readers!

Technorati Tags: tina su,henrik edberg,post ideas,blogging

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2. No-blog-y’s Perfect! Discover Your Strength No-blog-y
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4. Irrelevant Posts and Categories! Maybe You Like Them, Your Readers Certainly Don’t Irrelevant

When I take a walk on the blogosphere, I tend to look at a blog’s categories list and the posts inside. Then I match them against the blog’s title.

If I find them pointing to the same direction, I’ll subscribe to their feed. If I see some effort to make relevant posts to the blog’s headline, I’ll enjoy receiving their updates. I mean, I don’t want an information whether “the Catholic Church is the True Church of Christ or Not” from a technology blog! If I want to, I’ll subscribe to the Pope’s blog instead .

Now, have you had irrelevant posts? What makes you do so? If you’re not sure, see if these conditions ever appear on your blogging journey, causing distracted posts:

• Increasing blog maintenance cost, utility bills, lifestyle cost, etc without blog’s raise in revenue, followed by…
• An over the usual paid review offer on things not related at all to your blog’s topic.
• Popular happenings or products having nothing to do with your blog’s niche or your area of expertise, but since everybody’s talking about it, your post joins the conversation.
• Something you find amusing, special, interesting happens in your life. Unfortunately, they have nothing to do with your blog’s purpose, which means they’re useless for your readers.

And maybe there are more problems driving you to post off-topic posts. Don’t worry! I’m not the perfect blogger either. I’ve also been persuaded by those situations to compromise my pledge to post Make Money Online tips on my blog.

So what should we do best? If I have no more options, I tried to make them least irritating for my readers. I give my readers an authorization to choose which posts they want to read.

As an initial step, I created a one-category-fits-all for my off topic posts. For example, if you have a blog about golfing, you can add a category called “Miscellaneous” or “Grunts You Don’t Wanna Read” (I think it’s too long, but you get the idea). This is where you can put your posts about your granma, your vacation, your wordpress upgrade and everything outside your golfing topic. But it’s still not good enough, since readers will be forced to read them on the main page and via feed updates. So, you alse need to…

…group them separately on the main page, so they won’t mixed up with relevant posts your golfing article. This way, readers will easily skip them if they’re not interested. Or even better,…

….you can make them available only on the blog. So, readers who subscribe to read your golfing articles, won’t get a feed update on “Your Cat Puked on the Carpet This Morning” .

Furthermore, is what I’ve done with my “Contest” section. I’ve made it invisible on the homepage and feed updates. It’s only accessible via the links on the blog. It’s kinda like a tiny-winy-itsy-bitsy bribe to visit the site, hehehe… (curious about the hack? Here are the tips..).

Finally, I hope you can find a solution to overcome your personal needs while keep providing the best for your readers.

What’s your opinion on this matter? Should irrelevant blog posts be kept away from the readers? Or should readers leave them to the authors? What would you do to your irrelevant posts?

Technorati Tags: blog category tips,blog post tips,blogging tips

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Are you sure you’ve SEOed all aspects on your blog? All posts, pages, categories, tags, titles… If you’ve thought of all the pages you’ve made for your readers, then you’re forgetting one page you didn’t do anything with at first place, the 404 Error pages! Yes, your eyes aren’t fooling you. What can you do with a 404 Error page? A lot of things you’ve never thought of .

Since the 404 Error page is basically an empty page, you can stuff it with anything you like for any purposes. You can put ads or even your affiliate links there. Since the post’s title involves SEO, let’s see how you can implement SEO tips using 404 Error page not found.

The basic idea is to make your 404 Error page looks similar to your usual post page, or to your archives page. You can begin by replacing the standard “Nothing found for bla bla bla” with your blog’s title. Assuming that you also SEOed your title, you’ll know that you need to put a keyword rich phrase – but not spamming – into the title.

After the title, goes the content. You can briefly explain your blog (I mean, very briefly – they may be old visitors who already visit your “About” page), followed by an error not found message and some suggestion links to your best or your most recent posts. You can also provide them a link to your sitemap, or a search box, in case the links weren’t as helpful. The aim is your visitors will find what they’re looking for on that page or a click away.

Just to remind you of the purpose of SEOing the 404 Error page, you may want to spread keywords accordingly throughout the content. Your suggested links may also need to support your blog’s targeted keywords. Here is also your chance to write the posts title in a different way than it appears as single post pages. For example, this post is entitled “Using 404 Error Page for SEO Benefits”. You can suggest it as “Retain Traffic from Nowhere In Your Blog”. This is similar to relating certain words in your posts to your past articles.

Now that you’ve got another picture on how you can maximize your 404 Error page’s potential, what will you do to yours? What is the best thing to do to your 404 Error page?

Technorati Tags: 404 error pages,search engine optimization tips,seo tips,error 404 page not found,blog seo tips,create 404 error pages

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Having that in mind, I also wanted to display the most recent posts according to their categories inside the tabs. The problem is, I didn’t know how . Then I emailed Andrew Rickmann from WPFun.co.uk about my problem. He replied (fast! and actually I asked one more person, but only Andrew replied) and suggested using the “query_posts” to assign the category ID or name to the following codes used to display the latest posts. He also provided two resources to refer to:

http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts

Thanks to his replies, I’m can now display the latest post of any category on any page of this Make Money Online blog! And also, thank you to Noemi for precious suggestions and opinions!

Technorati Tags: wordpress,display latest post from a category

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Are bots being the only ones commenting on your posts? Do you run out of content ideas? Are you becoming a scrapers mock, stealing your content?

Your ad space are empty for months or the ones sticking there are your own affiliate ads?

Are you suffering low ranks? Lousy search engine placement? Too many bandwidth used and you don’t know why?

Those are the questions popped up in our thought at some time ago and we maybe chose to forget about them or not discover the precise solution. If you don’t mind jogging your memories a little, you can scan through a list of blogger’s troubleshooter by Andre Messer. A very useful list to remind you which part of your blogging optimization you haven’t done. As well as helping you to solve some of your blogging problems.

Technorati Tags: blogging troubles,blogging problems,blogging solution

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There are always obstacles in committing good deeds. Bloggers who implemented do-follow attribute on their comment section grew tired of spams and decided to alter their appreciation to commentators in various ways.

I’m not debating their reasons, most of what they say are true. Generosity invites people coming. Do-following links give some people shallow reason to comment. Then they put their name leaving short messages like “I like it!”, “Awesome”, “I agree”, (or worse, anchor texts) with purpose is only to get backlinks to whatever URL they put.

So, how do I deal with such issue? Recognizing that the one of the solutions is to prevent blog bouncers visiting our blog just to drop comments, I need to set a minimum number of comments written before the author is eligible to have his/her links followed. I didn’t choose to alter to Top Commentators plugin because I think it’ll also cause people to send comments flood in order to have their name/anchor text displayed all over the blog (if it’s displayed on the sidebar, for example).

Using the same plugin, I can also choose to limit the dofollow link only to author’s name field. This way, links on comment text field won’t be followed. They can put whatever links they’re up to, my link juice isn’t leaking ! And since the comment text field is no longer interesting for robots, whatever is inside will take effect only to the eye of human readers. If comment authors realize this, they are encouraged to comment accordingly instead of just 2-3 words.

Maybe the plugin I am using could help you revive your support to “no nofollow” society. But if it couldn’t, I’m sure that your endeavor to appreciate blog readers will keep moving on!

“Give, and it will come back to you”. I’m not sure she said it, but I bet she’d agree .

Technorati Tags: do-follow,no-follow,blog comment text

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