Do you use tags? Did you know they can bash your Google Page rank? But you can fix that?

Reading Graywolf’s blog, I was reminded to watch out for duplicate content issues and Wordpress. It turns out that the wordpress default doesn’t nofollow “tags”.

Because bloggers who tag posts tend to create zillions of tags, they often end up with exactly one post in a many individual “/tag/” directories. This nearly always create duplicate content, which is not a good thing.

You’ll want to fix this; it’s fairly easy. I fixed the issue by modifying my robots.txt file.

What’s a Robot.txt file?

The robots.txt file is a plain text file you place in your root directory. It tells robots not to crawl specific files thereby eliminating the duplicate content issue.

The robot.txt file for BigBucksBlogger now reads like this: (more…)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 7 comments

I’ve updated Lucia’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 Lucia’s 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 “Lucia’s Linky Love!” So, I’m currently running the old version. Needless to say, I’ll be fixing that bug!

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 11 comments

Recently, Sebastian suggested that paid link sellers could switch their business model by secretly no following links. That is, making the paid links look like they “follow” except when viewed by Google’s spiders. These type of links would be called “cloaked nofollows”.

As it happens, I thought about this strategy way back when I wrote How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles. Sebastian’s article discussed the “pro” side of this cloaking nofollows on paid links. I’m going to discuss the “cons”.

But first, a bit of nuts and bolts.

Is it possible to cloak nofollows?!

Absolutely! It is entirely possible to deliver one page to the Googlebot and another to human visitors. I discuss how to deliver cloaked nofollow entire pages in How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles. Should you wish to delve deeper into the subject; I recommend reading Sebastian’s and Tellin’ Ya’s articles.

If you were to want to cloak nofollows with Wordpress, you would likely do it using a plugin you could use as linkbait, right?

Here are 6 reasons why I wouldn’t write a plugin to cloak nofollowed paid links!

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© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 15 comments

Recently, Shoemoney blogger Pamcakes recorded a video in which she says the dofollow movement a “became a blogroll circle jerk” of brandnew or low quality blogs “dragging on for months”, announced that Greg Bozer is setting up a dofollow list for ‘quality’ blogs, and then tells us she’s “looking forward to the follow on blogposts where people tell us how much more time people have spent moderating after removing nofollow from their comments”.

What is Pam’s evidence that the dofollow movement is a blogroll circle jerk? Or that the dofollow blogs will have trouble with spam? Eyerolls.

Still many bloggers read Shoemoney; many might ask: Are dofollow blogs poor quality? Brandnew? Full of spammy comments?

If so, why is the dofollow movement gaining popularity? And, more importantly, why do I run across so many good dofollow blogs?!

Obviously, just as there are poor “dofollow” blogs; there are also loads of poor “nofollow” blogs. There are brand new dofollow blogs; there are tons of brand new “nofollow” blogs. What of it?

But the insinuation that dofollow disproportionately attracts spam is just flat out, wrong.

The reality is Dofollow often raises the level of comments.

How does dofollow raise the level of comments?

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© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 16 comments

I updated Hide Sponsored Categories plugin to run with WP 2.3. I’ve been running the updated version for a week here at this blog (which still uses WP 2.2). I also tested it at my test blogs, one of which runs on WP 2.2; one runs on WP 2.3.

What’s “Hide Sponsored Categories” used for?

The main use is to permit bloggers to place all sponsored posts in categories like “PPP”, “ReviewMe”, “Smorty”, “Sponsored Reviews”, “Loud Launch” and etc, but not display those labels publicly. Using these categories is convenient for bloggers, but displaying them violates Pay Per Post Best Practices.

So, by using the plugin, you can have convenience and still conform to best practices. You can create private “meta-categories” that don’t display but which are active for the purpose of:

• using the built-in WP search tool to find all “sponsored” posts when you, the blogger, are logged in and managing your blog.
• using “logic” to filter “sponsored” posts in some way. For example, you can use Kontera Control to keep Kontera ads out of sponsored posts while showing the ads in all other posts. You can use “No Old Spam Links” to “nofollow” all links in Sponsored Posts after your contractual obligation to follow has expired.

Due to changes in how WP handles categories, I had to make quite a few internal modifications. The new plugin should:

• Still work with WP 2.2, particularly when you call the categories using normally available template tags I checked the display with every default template provided by my installation of WP 2.2.



• Now work with widgeted sidebars; see the sidebar widget to the right? I only tested how widgets worked on two or three themes. (This should be enough, but if you have difficulties, let me know.)
• Works with WP 2.3. If you use WP 2.3 and widgets, use the widget to insert the custom functions. If you don’t use widgets, you must make replace the normal WP template tags found in sidebars with special purpose template tags. For your convenience, I described these in the user admin panel for the plugin.

From the user point of view, the plugin mostly works the way the original one does; the user instructions are found in Hide Sponsored Categories.. That page still has the link to the old version– which doesn’t work for WP 2.3, and doesn’t work with widgets.

To get the new version, download this:
Hide Sponsored Categories

After one or two people use the new version and give me feedback, I’ll describe the new options in better detail and update all documentation.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 2 comments

Do you want to find a way to improve your feed be a great way to get good traffic, (possibly) attracting more Diggs, and Stumbles? Well, why not add a link to comments, the blog post, and to any social networks they might wish to click?

You can do this fairly easily using Better Feed, which improves your feed in a number of ways. It automatically

1. Adds a permalink to your post at the bottom of the feed.
2. Adds a link to comments to the bottom of the feed.
3. Adds links to categories at the bottom of the feed and
4. Adds links to Technorati.

It also permits you, the blogger to add additional html text.

My knitting blog displays a footer that almost matches the default; I replaced some paragraph breaks with line breaks. This is what the footer on the feed of my knitting blog as displayed in Google Reader.

Are you saying “Big deal”? Well, the link to comments, in particular, can encourage some regular visitors to come to the blog to post their own comment.

I’d show you the BigBucksBlogger footer, but the feed exists only after I hit “publish”, the Google reader only displays the new feed a little later. (The time delay is a bit inconvenient if you edit, since you’ll need to publish, then read your footer. Plus, the feed services can be stubborn about updated– which is why some of you may see typos in the footer today! But.. oh well. )

How can you customize the footer?

First, you don’t need to customize. The default footer is already terrific. But if you want to add or remove things to the footer, you should look for the bit of code that falls between ‘ <<<FEEDFOOT’ and ‘FEEDFOOT;’

Start by adding html you’d like to appear after the “Technorati” link. Then examine your footer, and you can start to move things around.

Over the next few days, I’ll be adding appropriate links to encourage people to add my post to social networks. When I figure that out, I’ll let you know how to do it!

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 2 comments

Today brings a flood of announcements that Google has knocked down many blog Page Ranks. This is thought to be due to a number of factors including excess numbers of paid posts. So, it is natural that I should hurry up and update “No Old Spam Links”, the plugin that lets you automatically “nofollow” sponsored posts after your contractual obligation to “follow” has expired.

In principle, this plugin may help protect your PR. In practice? Matt Cutts’ has never commented on “No Old Spam Links” and is likely unaware of it. So, who knows?

That said, here are the recent changes to the plugin:

1. I discovered and fixed a bug that sometimes when widgets were used. I fixed the bug.
2. I discovered and fixed a bug that sometimes occurs when you have no specific people in your “nofollow” list. Unfortunately, this bug was affecting my knitting blog so I was giving out way more followed paid links than I intended! Way more.)(Yes, my knitting blog’s page rank dropped; I’ll elaborate on this in a separate post.)
3. I tested the new version with WP 2.3. It works fine.

So, if your worried about excess followed paid links, I suggest you install No Old Spam Links. If you aren’t worried about Google, or you are waiting for them to announce the plugin helps, then don’t use it.

Other plugin news:

1. Tricia is testing the new version of Kontera Control at her WP 2.2 blog. I’m testing at my test blog. She was the one who alerted me to the general issue of plugins going buggy when widgets are used.
2. I updated “Hide No Sponsored Categories” but I’m letting it sit a few days so I can do a better job detecting any bugs. The future version should work for WP 2.3, be compatible with widgets (in fact, it is widgetized) and hopefully work for all versions of WP 2.2 and above. I also coded to detect problems with early version of WP and inform the user why the options page doesn’t display. (This was, btw, the update from hell because my favorite WP category hook vanished!)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | No comment

I’m updating Kontera Control to work with Wordpress 2.3 and address pesky issues that Tricia of Feverish Thoughts and Loren of Today’s Gizmo’s alerted me to. Guess what? You can help me.

If you use Kontera Control and have experienced any problems or observed any strangeness, please:

1. Describe the problem.
2. Tell me the name of your theme.
3. Describe any widgets or other plugins you use — comments and categories widgets and plugins are usually the most crucial ones for me to know about. (If you don’t know your plugins and widgets off hand, I’ll ask you by email.)

Why will this information help me? Consider what happened with Tricia’s Theme.

Tricia had an issue with Kontera ads appearing in posts in the ‘Sponsored Category’ after she widgetized her site using the Raindrops theme — the plugin had worked before widgetizing.

Deactivating the widgets did not cause the error to go away. (It’s odd the error doesn’t go away when you de-widgetize … but… whatever.)

By testing Kontera Control using Tricia’s theme on my test blog, I discovered the precise incompatibility which is: The Rainbows widget somehow fills the global “comment variable” (called $comment) in a way that causes it to be “true” even outside comments.

This is a bit pesky, and caused my Kontera Control to fail, because I anticipated that “$comment” would be “false” outside comments. Silly me.

(Turns out it’s very, very easy to work around this. But, I need to figure out precisely what went wrong first.)

Anyway, if you are having an issue, give me as much detail, and as soon as possible. That way, I can get the fixed version of KC out by Friday, (which will make Tricia very happy!)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 3 comments

Like many bloggers, I’m in the process of upgrading their Wordpress to the new version: WP 2.3. For many bloggers, upgrading will be a snap. Others will find their upgrade is technically just fine, but some plugins and widgets don’t work. Finding substitutes will take time.

So, it’s probably a good time to learn some tips for ensuring that you can maintain full functionality while you upgrade Wordpress. I’ll include steps the WP developers don’t tell you!

1. Most plugins that deal with Categories and Tags will break.
   WP 2.3 totally restructured the way it deals with categories and tags. Nearly any plugin that uses categories and tags in any way will almost certainly break.

   If you absolutely one of these plugins to work, do not upgrade until after the plugin author announces that specific plugin works with WP 2.3.

2. You should create a “test blog”.
   A test blog is nothing more than a near duplicate of your regular blog. Create it at your host; its own database so you don’t “stomp” on your main blog when you test upgrading. Then install the same theme and plugins you use at your regular blog. Write a few “test” posts just to have something in the database.

   How is this used? I pre-test every plugin or widget I download on my test-blog. That way, I can identify any incompatibilities without risking taking my real blog down.

   The test-blog is especially important during major upgrades, because there is a strong possibility that a few of the plugins you use will no longer work as advertised. If you upgrade the test blog first, you maintain your old blog while testing all plugins, widgets, theme changes and pretty much everything before upgrading your public blog. This helps you identify incompatibilities, and also gives you time to identify substitute plugins for your real blog.

3. Wrap all ’special’ ‘template tags’ calls in “if/else” blocks.
   During upgrade, you will often turn off plugins. When you do, you may see a big black mysterious error messages like this:

   Fatal error: Call to undefined function utw_showrelatedpostsforcurrentpost() in /home/…/upgradeTest/wp-content/themes/ygo-assorted/Post.php on line 38

   These blog killing errors are nearly always due to missing special purpose “template tags” a plugin developer wrote. When the plugin associated with any ’special’ template tag is active, the special template tag calls a different block only available in only when the plugin is activated. Otherwise, you get the skanky error.

   To avoid this problem, wrap all special template tags– like ‘utw_showrelatedpostsforcurrentpost();’ in “if/else” structures similar to this:

   if(function_exists(’utw_showrelatedpostsforcurrentpost’)){
   utw_showrelatedpostsforcurrentpost();}
   else{echo(’activate plugin ‘); }

4. Anticipate difficulties and delays with major upgrades.
   If you use very vew plugins, your upgrade will probably be a snap. Many bloggers just click the “one click update” and they are done.

   However, if you use loads of plugins, you could have difficulties. For example, one blog visitor tells me “adSense Deluxe” doesn’t work in WP 2.3. Also, some of the various “tag” plugins with WP 2.2.X, you may need to run a script to restore functionality. So budget some time.

   Because I’m in the process of upgrading plugins, I am also aware that quite a few “hooks” available prior to WP 2.3 have simply vanished; (one of my favorites is gone!) “Hooks” are used to pull in plugin functionality at a certain point in WP; when the hook is vanishes, a plugin that uses that hook doesn’t work at all. So, in this case, you fiddling with your theme won’t help.

5. Let the plugin developer know if a plugin breaks.
   If a plugin breaks, let the developer know. If you can’t find an email address, post about the problem at your blog and leave a trackback to the blog post where you can get the plugin.

   The big advantage to informing the plugin developer is they may be able to save you time by either confirming that a) It’s not you, it’s the plugin, b) they may point you toward the fix or c) they may schedule some time to fix the issue.

   In anycase, even though the developer may be busy and unable to look or fix the issue quickly, they will want you to let them know. They are the best person to help you!

Meanwhile: Good luck with your upgrade. Mine will be slower than most because I’m updating my plugins in parallel. I think I have “HideSponsoredCategories” finished, and “KonteraControl” is next. I’m on schedule to finish my upgrade in.. how many weeks was that? Well, soon.

With luck, and effort, a new version of Kontera Control will be available next week.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 3 comments

Continuing in the lesson on how to upgrade Blogger to a Wordpress installation! Today, I’ll explain how to install Wordpress on the web site you got up and running yesterday. (For earlier lessons click Getting a hosting plan and Creating your “website”.

I hope the length of these directions aren’t frighntening you off! What I’m trying to do is give a detailed illustrated explanations for an instruction that some bloggers would explain in this single line:

“To install Wordpress at Dreamhost, click ‘Goodies=>OneClick Installation=>Select options’ Then click to activate”.

My explanation will include screenshots, words, and also try to explain how the same advice applies if you use Fantastico instead of “one click installation”.

So, how to actually install Wordpress

There are at least two ways to install Wordpress: The extremely very easy way and the “hard” way. It’s not that hard.¹ Nevertheless, I advise installing the easy way:

The easy way to install Wordpress

1. Use a hosting plan that offers “one click installation” or “fantastico” for Wordpress.
2. Fill out an easy form, click a button. Wait 10 minutes.

I use Dreamhost, so I can show you how to do a simple install using their service. If you use another service, you will likely find “Fantastico”, which has very similar steps. (But the screen shots will look different.). If you can’t find either, ask your support service where to find one of these services.

How to use Dreamhost’s ‘one click’ installation.

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© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 3 comments