Tag Archives: spam

More on AdSense Splogs

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Four more pingbacks from feedscrapers today!

After writing my two splogging-related posts this morning, I went for a flight with some clients. Just got back a while ago. And what do I find in my e-mail inbox? Four more splog pingbacks!

I also found a message from Jim Mitchell, responding to an e-mail I’d sent him earlier in the day. He included a link to a blog post on MaxPower that provides two good methods for stopping AdSense sploggers. I’m going through it now. But the thing I wanted to share was this explanation of what splogging is, for those of you who have no idea what I’ve been whining about all day.

From Stopping Adsense Splogs & Spammers: Methods that Work on MaxPower:

Imagine searching for something or other on the Internet and arriving at a webpage chocked full of ads and stuffed with the exact keyword you were searching for. The page is of no help because it contains no content of value. Some guy somewhere, created a website that sucks keywords / newstories / content from other websites using RSS, inserted the right keywords to maximize profit from Adsense, and waited for Google to index and rank it high enough for you stumble upon it. Once at the page, the spammer (or spamdexer) hopes that you will click on one of the Adsense ads that seem helpful compared to the rest of the useless random text. This practice of spamdexing wastes your time, its annoying, and you can fight back.

If you’ve seen this on your blog, follow the above link to the MaxPower article to see what you can do about it.

Six Improvements For Your Blog

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From lifehack.org

Interested in a few basic blog improvements? Chris Brogan’s article should give you some ideas.

From Six Improvements to Your Blog on lifehack.org:

I’ve done a lot of blog surfing lately, in search of new (best) blogs. What I found often, however, was that there are things people could do to improve the relationship and interaction value of their blogs, which would in turn build a better bridge between blogs and their readers.

Chris’s six tips are extremely basic, with advice that includes formatting posts to make them more legible and making it easy for readers to contact you. I don’t agree with everything said — for example, the contact advice doesn’t work for me and I don’t see anything wrong with captchas if they prevent comment spam — but it’s a good look at some things you may be able to do to improve your blog overall.

Does anyone have any other tips they might want to share with readers? Use the Comments link here.

Rewarding Reader Participation

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Because reading blogs should not be a spectator sport.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m blogging to myself. I know I’m not — the stats show more than 3,000 page views a week here, which isn’t too shabby. But the people who stop by seem to read (or browse) and hurry on their way without offering any feedback on what they’ve read.

Now everyone has an opinion and I like to think that everyone has additional insight they can share on many topics. That’s what the Comments links are for. So, in an effort to encourage comments from readers, I’ve decided to experiment with a little giveaway.

At January month-end, I’ll give away one of my books to a randomly selected commenter who posted a comment on one of my January 2007 posts. The book is reader’s choice from currently available titles. If this little reward program is successful at getting site visitors to participate with useful, insightful comments, I’ll continue the program for each month with similar rewards.

Keep in mind that this applies to comments posted using the Comments link for a particular post on this site. (Feedback submitted via contact form is not eligible.) The comment must pass muster with our spam prevention software, so if you comment and your comment doesn’t appear within 48 hours, it’s likely that its content was considered spam.

What do you think about this? Don’t keep it to yourself. Use the Comments link.

E-Mail Subscribers

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A report on the subscription count here.

This morning, I took a peek at the Feedburner e-mail subscription count for this site. This service, which works with my RSS feed, automatically generates a daily e-mail message that summarizes the articles posted to the site in the previous day. If there were no articles in a day, there’s no e-mail. If there were 1 or more articles in a day, 1 e-mail message is generated and sent. The message includes links to the full article content. So a subscriber can skim through a new content message, decide he wants to read an article, click the link to the article, and jump right to the article’s page. Easy and an effective way to keep track of what’s new without having to manually browse the site each day.

E-Mail Subscription ConfirmationThe service, which is full automated, works with the E-Mail Notification form that appears on the site’s Home page. A person who wants to subscribe enters his e-mail address and clicks Subscribe. A window opens with a form that prompts him to enter characters in a box. When he clicks Complete Subscription Request, Feedburner generates a confirmation e-mail message and sends it to his e-mail address. That prevents people from subscribing others to this service when they might not want it. He must click the link in that message when he receives it (normally within about a minute) to start the subscription. If he doesn’t click the link, the subscription does not start.

Although this site gets a lot of visitors and many of them are repeat visitors, it only has 12 e-mail subscribers. I think it’s because people are worried that they’ll get a lot of junk mail.

But here’s the truth: subscribers only get the messages as described here. There’s no junk. I know this because I’m a subscriber — I signed on to monitor how this feature works and make sure it doesn’t spam my subscribers. I’m very pleased with the results and highly recommend it to anyone interested in keeping track of content. It’s especially good for people who don’t subscribe to or monitor RSS feeds, which offer another way to keep track of what’s going on here without manually visiting. (I don’t follow RSS feeds because they’re simply not a part of my normal daily routine. E-mail, however, is.)

Anyway, if you’re a regular visitor, I urge you to give this feature a try. I think you’ll like it. And if you don’t, that’s okay. You can always unsubscribe.

Keeping Up to Date with this Site

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A few tips for keeping up to date with what’s new without having to surf over here every day or two.

The other day, Cliff, one of my editors, asked me (in an iChat chat) what the best way was to keep track of the new material on this site. He wanted to read my “pearls of wisdom” (his words, not mine, and I think he was teasing me) regularly.

Cliff uses a newsreader to monitor blogs. I think he was more interested in the how-to stuff I write to support my books than the somewhat boring pieces about my every day life. After all, do people really want to know that as I type this, my bird is barking like a dog in the next room? Or that I hung up on a Republican canvasser who called me in my office today? Or that today’s humidity in Phoenix is only 3%?

I told Cliff there were a few ways to keep up with this site’s new content:

  • Subscribe to an RSS feed for the entire blog. The good thing about doing this is that you won’t miss anything new. The 25 most recent posts are always available in the feed, so if you check in at least once a week, you’ll be all set. The bad thing about that is that you have to use a newsreader (which many people don’t use). And you will get summaries of all 25 most recently posted articles, including the ones about barking birds, being rude to republicans, and Arizona weather. If you want to do this, use my Feedburner feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/marialanger.
  • Visit my RSS feeds page and subscribe to just the feed(s) that interest you. Just interested in a book or two? Subscribe to just the feeds for those titles. Want to learn more about flying a helicopter for hire? Subscribe to just that topic’s feed. You’ll still need a newsreader, but at least you won’t have to read summaries about posts that you don’t think will interest you. (Of course, you may be surprised by what you miss.)
  • Use the E-mail Notification form in the navigation bar on most (if not all) pages of this site to subscribe to this blog by e-mail. This is a great way to keep up with the site without having to set up or use a newsreader. I subscribed to see how it worked and I’m very pleased with the results. Each day that I post to this blog, an e-mail message is created that provides a brief summary, with links, for all the posts written that day. So if I wrote 10 posts that day, you get one e-mail. If I wrote one post that day, you get one e-mail. If I didn’t write any posts that day, you don’t get an e-mail at all. The e-mail goes out in the middle of the night, so the message is in your in-box in the morning (like the New York Times, delivered, but without the airs). There are no ads and you don’t get spammed. Best of all, when you get sick of reading this drivel, you can cancel your subscription to stop the e-mails.

Of course, you can always make a point of stopping by this site to see what’s new — the old fashioned way. Visitors are always welcome.

And have you read yet about my chicken with the crooked beak?

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