By now you have create a floor layout of your blog with the FREE BLOG Planning Form. You choose a host, have painted the walls by choosing a theme,  and you hung up a sign letting folks know that an exciting thing is going to happen in this new home.

Now it is time to call a security company to activate an alarm system. Why? Because your site is alive on the internet although you have not moved your furniture into it. You will have folks trying to break in with something call SPAM.

Activate Your Askismet Before You Move Into Your Blog Home

Akismet to the Rescue for Wordpress Blogs

Akismet is a FREE plugin that fights spam on your blog. It comes standard with all Wordpress blogs. I found out that there is also a commercial key you can purchase. Rather than explain all the levels here is a link to their site.(Note that this is not an affiliate.)

Here is a pretty clear video on how to activate your plugin. I was going to create one but I must admit it was faster going to YouTube.

Now time to work on the next part to this series. Did I leave anything out? Can anyone share what plugins fight spam on Typepad or other hosted blogging platforms?

Tweet This Post

I got 30 comments in only 10 minutes. How? It was real simple and you can do it too-BUT I HOPE YOU DON’T.!

After my husband and I upgraded 9 of our sites to Version 2.7 we forgot, in the heat of upgrade passion, to ACTIVATE one of our plugins. Namely, Akismet. You know the one behind the scenes catching all that funky spam.

So when I got all those comment notifications in my email, of course I was delighted. But all of them were spam. Boo hoo. So, after a bulk deletion, all the spam was gone. And I made sure that I activated that wonderful Akismet plug in.

So don’t you make the same mistake.

Tweet This Post

Splogs  and scraper sites are places that I have too often found my articles and posts  with intrusive links and ads. Today I found out what they were and what can be done about them. So below are several definitions  of splogs, spam, scaper sites and some posts from bloggers that may help you keep your sanity.

From Wikipedia:

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers
Splogs are blogs where the articles are fake, and are only created for search engine spamming. To spam in blogs, conversely, is to include random comments on the blogs of innocent bystanders, in which spammers take advantage of a site’s ability to allow visitors to post comments that may include links.
Sping is short for “spam ping”, and is related to fraudulent pings from blogs using trackbacks, called trackback spam. Pings are messages sent from blog and publishing tools to a centralized network service (a ping server) providing notification of newly published posts or content. Spings, or ping spam, are pings that are sent from spam blogs, or are sometimes multiple pings in a short interval from a legitimate source, often tens or hundreds per minute, due to misconfigured software, or a wish to make the content coming from the source appear fresh.

A scraper site is a website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping.[1] No part of a scraper site is original. A search engine is not a scraper site: sites such as Yahoo and Google gather content from other websites and index it so that the index can be searched with keywords. Search engines then display snippets of the original site content in response to a user’s search.

In the last few years, and due to the advent of the Google Adsense web advertising program, scraper sites have proliferated at an amazing rate for spamming search engines.[1] Open content sites such as Wikipedia are a common source of material for scraper sites.

Here is a great definition and article from Techtarget

Now you know when you are bothered by keying in those funny looking words when you go on some sites? Especially if you go to the RSS via Feedburner? Well, I finally appreciate it. It is called CAPTCHA It is one of the good guys because it attempts to catch those nasty splogs.

IPA: /?kæpt??/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process usually involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. (Wikipedia)

Some suggest that Google may benefit from sploggers….

A recent blog posted about the possibility of some political blogs that were splogs.

Finally, my sanity solution is to know that splogs can be reported. You know clicking on that flag in blogger or reporting to google. Perhaps more but something can  be done. I did not know when I first started blogging and became upset when I saw  it from a google alert on my articles but now I do.  Read this post from lorelle.wordpress on helping to clean up splogs.

Can anyone suggests plug-ins that can help protect our blogs?

Oops, almost neglected to put a category on this post, when you see posts without categories they can smell like a splog.

Tweet This Post