I’ve moved on to other things. These plugins are no longer supported.

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I’ve updated L’s Linky Love for WP 2.3. Sort of. It turned out the plugin already worked for WP 2.3. However, I did make a two mods at user request:

1. Josh Spaulding requested the ability to dofollow trackbacks immediately. That function now exists.
2. Tricia identified a bug that appeared to sometimes occur when people left “names” with apostrophe (that is “‘”) in them. I think I coded corrected.

If you’d like the new version, download Linky Love for WP 2.3. Unzip. Place in plugin folder. Deactivate the old version, activate this one.

If you notice any problems, let me know so I can fix.

A word or caution
Trackback spam can be particularly pesky. I have seen a rash of semi-innocent looking scraper blogs that post snippets of your content. I call these Daegan Spam. If you keep those trackbacks and visit later, you will notice the blogs get redirected to irrelevant thin-affiliate sites for commercial products. This causes you to link into a “bad neighborhood”, which is a bad thing.

I’m planning a tool to help us find these things months later, “just in case”, but haven’t thought through the best way to do it yet.

Meanwhile, be very vigilant about trackback spam. When in doubt delete.

In the “irony” department

I found a bug in “Hide Sponsored Categories Plugins” for 2.3. It only happens for categories that have apostrophe’s in their name. I have such a category. It’s the one for “L’s Linky Love!” So, I’m currently running the old version. Needless to say, I’ll be fixing that bug!

Here we have two blog visitors from France:

forum | forum@hotmail.fr | forumyum.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you

tılsım adası | tilsimad@hotmail.fr | tilsimadasi-dizi-izle.blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you very good job

A celebrity:

hilary duff | hilary_d@hotmail.com | hilaryduff-music. blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
waooovv good very thanks

A nice note from ‘evden eve nakliyat’, who must think this blog is written by more than one young man:

evden eve nakliyat | askliyat-@hotmail.com | evdenevenakliyat-b. blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you boys

Look, ‘evden eve nakliyat ‘ changed his email address (there by ensuring he would never ever get any link juice.)

evden eve nakliyat | evdenevenaaskliyat-@hotmail.com | evdenevenakliyat-a. blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you very good

‘etkileyici msn nickleri ‘who must be fascinated reading “thank you” over and over:

etkileyici msn nickleri | etkileyici-msn-nickleri@hotmail.com | etkileyici-msn-nickleri.blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thnak you i read all comment,this site super

msn nickleri | evdennsdf@hotmail.com | guzel-msn-nickleri.blogspot.com | IP: 160.75.111.14
thanks nice working

Someone, who like the others, is using a keyboard with no “Caps” key:

forum | forum@hotmail.com | komple.org | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you good work

‘evden eve nakliyat’ using yet another email address:

evden eve nakliyat | evdenevenakliyat@hotmail.com | evdenevenakliyatcim.net | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you yoru work

Does anyone even know where “.gz” is? Do they really want me to visit their site map?

msn nickleri | msnnick@hotmail.com | hayalbahcesi.net/urllist.txt.gz | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you from your writing

conquer online | coonline@hotmail.com | hayalbahcesi.net/sitemap_1.xml.gz | IP: 160.75.111.14
nice collection

I always love smilies.

knight online | knightonline@hotmail.com | hayalbahcesi.net/sitemap_index.xml.gz | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you good job

Fortunately, this is the last one, but notice they are very very grateful!

tsubasa | tsubasa@hotmail.com | hayalbahcesi.net | IP: 160.75.111.14
thank you very very much

Well…. these notes of gratitude are very sweet. But, I think these grateful people need to learn that to get a follow they must match all three of the following at once:

1. The “first name” in the name field.
2. The full email address and
3. The top level domain.

I mean, it’s just a shame that after all that effort with a broken keyboard, they never got a “follow”. Or were these “extremely relevant comments” added these using ‘Blog Comment Poster”? (Yes, such things exist. Yes, I’m making sure I learn their features. No, I don’t think you should buy it.)

Of course, when I saw all 13 matching IP’s I hurled these into Akismet’s spam maw. I’m sure you’ll do the same when ‘evden eve nakliyat’ from IP: 160.75.111.14 visits your site. But he probably won’t visit because by now, I’m sure Akismet has figured out that IP: 160.75.111.14 is a spammer.

Here are messages caught by Akismet:

Daniel | k.daniel@msn.com | love.assistsell.net | IP: 65.98.35.234
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Love Update Testing: Please Leave Comments. : …

As usual, I had the option to rescue the “relevant” comments from the spam bin.

Advice to Eric and Dan:

But, I will be watching you two. If you get a new roommate, I’m going to know his name!

SEO Tip

Remember I promised an SEO tip? This is going to be an odd one! I’m going to show you that the a silly post “Daniel Spam” has good on page SEO!

Obviously, a post like “Daniel Spam’ is not mostly designed as SEO. I wrote it because I am obsessed with spam while writing my plugin.

That said: when I write any post I try to use practices that will ensure each article I write gets at least 1 tail search google hit within one month of writing the post.

Does one long tail hit the first month sound like a drop in the bucket? It is. But this goal is sufficient to force you to develop good on page SEO habits. If you embrace it, Google will love you in the long run.

So, how did I know I could get a 1 long tail hit within the first month? Here’s how I knew:

• Daniel is hitting everyone, but the first time he hits, he only leaves one comment.
• People aren’t sure Daniel’s comment is spam. So they search!
• Last but not least: I included the distinctive search-able strings in the post. The successful searcher entered both “Daniel” (not distinctive) and his email address (distinctive).

So, the SEO tip: What ever you write, look for “distinctive search-able strings” and include them.

What are “distinctive search-able strings”

They things people might search on that make a particular post stand out as relevant to the searcher.

There are actually three distinctive search-able strings in “Daniel Spam”: 1) The unique email address, 2) the IP address and 3) the constantly repeated words he uses in his spam comments.

Anyone entering those in a search is looking for information on our friend Danie’s spam!

Is it worth the bother?

You are now thinking: Look, I blog to make money. What’s 12 visits a year? Plus, are these visits valuable?
Will these people return to my blog? Will they link me? Will they click my ads?

Well, unlike Technorati traffic which each visitor has a high likelihood of being interested in my niche, and converting to readers or linkers, those searching for “Daniel Spam” will probably not return soon. They probably won’t click contextual ads.

So, from a profit point of view this is not a ‘quality’ visit.

But remember: The post is a no-brainer to write. I wanted to comment on the topic. Some readers were amused.

So, the only questions left are: “Should I add the small details that bring in search traffic? Or leave them out?” And more importantly, “If I can’t even bring in 1 long tail search hit a year, is it worth the 20 minutes to even write?”

Well, I’ll add the small details and take the search traffic any time!

Anyway, think about this: The fact the visitor found me means one more blogger now knows Daniel really is a spammer.

I think for most bloggers, knowing a post I had fun writing helped someone in some way is great!

• New! User can delay dofollow some number of days. Default is zero, and that’s what I plan to use. This was added to fulfill a request.
• New! Problem related to a call to a function that did not exist in PHP 4 is fixed. This is provided to fulfill a request.
• New! You can skip the do follow for a particular name. I use this on my name both to save CPU and to minimize the risk that Google might think I am Google bombing to gain rank on the mega-important word .
• Do follow url in “name” after a specified number comments from a particular visitor: Blogger can specify the number “N” in a range.
• Do follow urls left in comments after a specified number of comments by a visitor.
• No follow “names” with too many characters. Number of characters specified by blogger.
• No follow all comments left more than 14 days after a blogger stops blogging entirely. This prevents your blog from becoming a link farm if you get busy, hit by a car or whatnot. (The superstitious know doing this will actually prevent you from being hit by a car.)

I also made a few invisible changes to further reduce the cpu. These are technical things that have to do with when and how the database is called. Note: This program already calls the database less than 1/4 as often as the original Linky Love.

Future Plans

I am looking into a few other issues to see if there are other ways I can optimize the plugin just in case we discover the plugin is cpu or memory intensive at blogs that contain many, many comments in the database and/or are get lots of comments.

I will be developing an comments review interface that simplifies catch and delete old comment spam that may have slipped through in the past. In particular, I what I have nick-named “Daniel” spam. That is spam that sort of looks innocent the first time you see it, but turns out to contain the same phrase over and over.

For more information, visit

Summary

Download. Upload to your plugin directory. Activate. Select your settings. Tell people about it.

Finally, leave me comments and trackbacks. And remember: I use this plugin. So, if you leave several comments, you’ll be dofollowed too!

I’m planning a new release of L’s Linky Love by Friday. The reason for the release is simple: I received a few requests for additional features/ fixes to ’s Linky Love; two were easy so I added them. I also added another feature I thought up myself. I’ve installed my updated version and I’m requesting comments to help me verify all the functions are still working .

Meanwhile, to give you something to comment one here are the features / fixes / hidden improvements in this release:

1. Time Delay:
   In addition to the previous matching, the blogger can now include a time delay. This was requiested by Steve Cronin of More then Scratch the Surface. I’ve set this to 1 day for today; I plan to set it to zero after today because I think the other checks are sufficient for my blog and blogging habits.
2. Bug fix:
   I rewrote the way I find the date of the most recent published blog post because they way I did it causes problems for at least one version of MySQL. The new way uses Wordpress functions, and so should work for anyone who manages to get wordpress to work. The bug was found by Aaron of milienzo.com
3. Name exclusion:
   The new plugin lets you excluse one “name” from being dofollowed. This is my own idea; the explanation follows.
4. CPU saving efforts:
   I did some Googling and discovered I can save a little CPU by modifying the MySQL ‘count(*)’ to ‘count(1).’ So, I changed that. I also reorganized some of the internal logic to make sure the “dofollow” logic granting code is exited as soon as we know the comment won’t be followed. This will save a small amount of CPU. These changes should have no visible effect, but since I made quite a few, I need to get a bunch of comments so I can verify!

A more major release to let us drill down and find old spam is planned after I get the “little” tweaks done.

Now, I think I should explain one of the features, as no one asked for it!

Why exclude one “name” from being dofollowed?

I noticed I lost page rank for my name after installing a dofollow plugin; I dropped from about 14 to who knows where.

My theory is that suddenly flooding my own knitting blog with internal links with the same anchor text set off Google’s google-bomb alert. If my theory is true, this will be a risk with all dofollow plugins.

I actually sort of like not appearing early on searches for my first name only. However, some people may hate losing rank for the name they use for comments at their own blogs.

In any case, I also realized I don’t really want to create even more internal links to my index page in comments. (The internal link issue will not be a problem for bloggers who have consistently logged in when leaving their own comments.

Anyway, to fix this, I coded the “name exclusion” option. I “exclude” my name from being ‘dofollowed’.

Now, please comment! (Especially if you’ve commented before

If I get a number of comments from newer and older visitors, I’ll be able to test the day exclusion fully and make sure I haven’t introduced any bugs while reorganizing the logic. (Comments from people other than me are essential. So are a few new comments so I can test the 1 day delay. )

I set Wordpress to email me every message. Yesterday, got a message from a visitor named “Love”, who evidently “loved” my pattern for a hand knit sock.

New comment on your post #733 “Double Decrease: Sl1, k2tog, psso.”
Author : Love (IP: 124.29.209.249 , 124.29.209.249)
E-mail : salman.soha@gmail.com
URI    : http://www.find-dating-services.us/
Whois: http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl? queryinput= 124.29.209.249
Comment:
I <a href= “http://www.find-dating-services.us/”
rel=”nofollow”> love </a> the zag sock pattern. That is so cool

You can see all comments on this post here: http://www.[...]
To flag this comment as spam, visit:

I checked the whois for the IP; evidently “love” connects through the Asian Pacific Network. Natch!

You know, I’m thrilled “Love” loves my sock patern; it’s a very cute sock pattern, and I’ve knit some for myself. Nevertheless, I flagged the item as comment spam; now Akismet can protect other bloggers from this “Love” who “loves” my sock patterns and who probably loves stuff at your blog too!

I’d also like to send a news flash to Love’s employer: they didn’t get a “follow” link for even one milisecond. Linky Love suppressed “dofollows” because Love didn’t leave 3 messages with matching “name”, “domain” and “email”. Spam Karma is never going to let “Love” leave three messages quickly enough for me not to delete them all.

If you run a dating service and want to get a link on one of my blogs, try to hire my through Pay Per Post. Or ReviewMe. Or even TLA. Or. . .

Oh, but I don’t run ads for dating services. So, you are S.O.L.!

What does the plugin actually do?

This is a variety of “dofollow” plugin. It’s main function is to strip “nofollow” tags from links in comments. The purpose is to encourage comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine. However, this particular plugin also has features that thwart human’s who are paid to visit blogs and leave insipid comments simply to boost their companies back links.

Here are the features:

1. Encourages good comments: Dofollows are added to the author “name” and links in comment text after a commenter leaves some minimum number of comments. The blogger can set this minimum number to anything between 3 and 10. This encourages regular visitors to comment, but discourages spammers by forcing them to visit your blog many times before they get “dofollows”.
2. Encourages links. Dofollows are added to trackbacks and pingbacks only after the blog author has left some minimum number of comments, trackbacks or pingbacks. This discourages scrapper sites from sending you spammy trackbacks but rewards real bloggers for linking you.
3. Gives peace of mind. Dofollows will not be added to comments left more than 14 days after you published your most recent post. This is a safety feature that prevents your blog from becoming a link farm should you ever be unexpectedly absent from your blog due to illness or any other major life event.
4. Thwarts overly aggressive SEO types. The blogger may refuse “dofollows” to “names” that contain too many characters. This can be used to avoid giving “dofollows” to commenters who claim their name is “cashmere dog sweater”.
5. Gives you more control over dofollow / nofollow options. As is always the case, the blogger can also delete the comment, report the comment to Akismet or delete the name or url. That’s good for truly spammy comments. But with L’s Linky Love, you get another, less drastic, option. You manually prevent “dofollow” but still show the comment url and name by deleting the user email address when editing the comment. This lets you permit borderline visitors continue to comment, but deprive them of “dofollows” until they behave the way you like visitors to behave.

Get L’s Linky Love Plugin.

1. Find the Admin Panel: Visit your Wordpress Admin panel find “Options” click. Click “L_LinkyLove” in the menu sub-bar. The admin panel will open.
    
2. Customize: In the top box, enter the number of comments you want visitors to leave before the “author name” associated with their comment becomes “dofollow” in the top box. In the second box, ener the number of comments you want visitors to leave before the comments they drop in the content become “dofollow”. In the third box, enter the maxmum number of characters in a “name” you are willing to dofollow. Finally, decide if you want me to drop links in your blog.
3. Click Submit. L’s Linky Love is now working!

Now for the big question:

Should you drop me links?

I bet you are trying to decide if you should give me links? Well, the links have several purposes. One is to get me zillions of links and propel me into the top ranks of money making bloggers. The more important reason is to inform valued commenters and spammers you are participating in Dofollow using my plugin rather than other plugins. My plugin makes it more difficult for human comment spammers to spam and it may discourage them from visiting your blog.

Currently, the plugin places a link just after single post; the text says
“Comments protected by L’s Linky Love.” Technically, this text appears outside the area where programs like PPP forbid links. However, to avoid the possibility that PayPerPost will ding you for links, you can limit display these informational links to older posts only be selecting: “Yes, but only on old posts”; older is defined as more than 180 days old. You can also exclude these links entirely.

What do I suggest you do? I think it’s useful to inform visitors about the plugin. So, I would suggest you select “yes” and display my links for a little while. Later, when you have time, create a “comment policy” page where you describe your comment policy; instead of showing my links, link to that. On that page, describe your policy and mention “L’s Linky Love”, posting the url of my plugin page. That will give me one link instead of zillions and also inform spammers and valued visitors of your comment policy.

Summary

Download L’s Linky Love. Use it. Tell people about it.

Finally, leave me comments and trackbacks and let me know how L’s LinkyLove works for you. And remember: I use this plugin. So, if you leave several comments, you’ll be dofollowed too!

1. LLL now matches on the top level domain instead of the full url. Andy Beard noticed that I was not truncated urls to the top level domain when counting to give credit for visitors comments. I decided I should truncate.
2. Long “names” can now be linked if the blogger wants to do so. LLL will permit the blogger to decide by entering a number in a box; the blogger will be able to enter any number greater than 15. I’ve set my thresh-hold to 35 characters at this blog, but have it set to 15 at the knitting blog. This should prevent my knitting blog from being inundated with comments from visitors with names like “discount sock yarn.”
3. Names now match on the first words only. So “Andy Beard — extra descriptive stuff”, matches “Andy Wibbles”. That might seem not quite right. However, since I’m also checking email address and top level domain having all “Andy’s” match should be sufficient to thwart human comment spammers.
4. Pingbacks are now “dofollowed” using the same comment count threshold as comments. Wordpress considers pingbacks comments, but I needed to code this explicitly because pingbacks don’t include email addresses and have unique “names”. (Even when the names are long, pingbacks will follow.)
5. Bloggers can leave “nofollows” in until the visitor’s comment count reaches 10 matches. Tricia suggested this. I’d selected 7 rather arbitrarily and based on my blog comment levels. Tricia’s post very frequently, gets more comments and more spam, so she’d like 10. I’m reluctant to make it higher.
6. LL lists the number of comments that “match” a visitor. I included this mostly to help me see what’s going on and I was planning to remove it. However, I rather like it now. Tell me if you hate the feature and I’ll deep six it.

The release is still due tomorrow. Thanks for the comments; I think the plugin will be more useful to the dofollow movement with these changes.

P.S. Thanks for some of the funny links. Tricia’s and Anna’s helped me realize I should match names on 1 word not 2, because if I’m dofollowing the long ‘Andy Beard’ link, consistency requires me to link Tricia’s and Anna’s.

P.S.S. Do start learning to leave the same email address every time! You’ll get follows sooner.

This comment plugin is intended to give “dofollow” bloggers better control of the follows they grant.

• Gives “DoFollow” to the author link after a visitor has commented a number of times specified by blogger. I permit the blogger to select a number of times between 3 and 7. (Note: The match criteria is matching email, name and url. )

  In my opinion, the lower limit of 3 is the minimum sensible number to thwart spammers; I plan to use this value. Any choice above 7 isn’t really giving out “dofollow” links.

• Gives “DoFollows” to links in comments after a visitor has commented the number of times specified by the blogger. I permit the blogger to select any number at all, and also never grant “DoFollows” to links in comment text.
• Only gives 1 dofollow to an individual visitor per post. That is: if the visitor makes 20 comments on one post, at most only the first comment qualifies for “dofollow”. The match is tested on visitor email address, url and IP address.
• Stops granting “dofollows” on comments made more than 14 days after the most recent post was published. This will prevent a blog from becoming a link farm if the blogger falls ill and is unable to delete or manage their blog.
• Will not give “dofollows” to any commenter who enters a name with more than 20 characters. This prevents people ‘named’ “Las Vegas Real Estate” or “Cashmere Dog Sweaters” from getting “dofollows.”
• Runs before NoOldSpamLinks. This permits NoOldSpamLinks to overide anythign done by this plugin.

Even with these features, I suspect human comment spammers will still try to get “dofollow” links. However, to do so, they will need to visit over and over and make reasonable thoughtful comments and basically behave like real honest to goodness blog visitors.

I’ll be visiting to checm my blogs to make sure the plugin actually does what I want it to do. If you are visiting, you may see your dofollows turning on or off as I periodically test the controls and check the blog display. Don’t worry; I will eventually stabilize.

I will probably release this on Wednesday. Meanwhile, my blog posts will be sort of boring!

I want to continue to give “dofollow” links to visitors who leave thoughtful comments and participate in conversations at my blog. I don’t want to grant “dofollows” to people who visit, leave truly stupid comments and drop irrelevant links in comments

For this reason, this morning I spent some time rigging up a “proto-plugin” that should to the following:

• Generally, grants “dofollow” to comments after a blog visitor leaves their fourth comment with matching email addresses, urls and author names. Once a visitor qualifies, the dofollows are applied retroactively.
• Exception: If a commenter left a name that is longer than 17 characters, they aren’t getting a dofollow on that name ever.

I’ll explain my reasoning for these choices on Wednesday when I have the first “real” version of this plugin available. (It will have a a user interface that lets individual bloggers tweak some choices. )

Meanwhile, if you are not a spammer and left a few comments earlier don’t worry about having lost your “dofollow”. Once you leave four comments, you comments will “follow”.

Oh… and let me know if you have any suggestions for plugin features. If I am aware of them, they are easy to code and don’t waste loads of CPU, I may include them!