This Is How You Should Deal With Trackback Spam

Trackbacks are extremely useful for bloggers and webmasters alike when it’s used properly. When used properly, trackbacks can help facilitate communication between blogs and notify bloggers when and who has written about their content. When it’s used in bad ways, it then becomes trackback spam – on par with that of comment spam.

What Are Trackbacks?

Trackbacks basically are a linkback to someone’s else content who has linked to yours. It is used to let the blogger who receives the trackback that someone else is referencing his post and mentioning his site. Trackbacks usually appear in your comments section of your blog (it depends on what type of blogging platform you use and the theme you are using).

Trackbacks look like this:

To see a live example, check out my post here and scroll to the bottom. Note: I deleted the link in the trackback. A trackback without it’s link deleted links back to the website that links to you.

Trackback Spam?

We’ve all heard about comment spam. It’s one of the things that every single blogger would most probably know about. Comment spams usually contain lots of hyperlinks to websites that have questionable content. Comments that do not contain any sort of hyperlinks but are not related to the topic or the post are also usually looked upon as spam and thus gets moderated by the administrator (This happens at Drett)

As comment spam filters are getting increasingly complex and effective, the spammers are getting more and more desperate to find new ways to spam a site, and thus trackbacks spam is born. A person with a website with questionable content links to your post, a trackback then appears on your post which links back to his website. Thus giving him the backlink he wants and also entirely bypassing comment spam filters. Don’t mix up legitimate trackbacks with spammy tackbacks. The spammy trackbacks are where the post in which the person links to you has entirely no relation to the content in which you are writing about while the legitimate trackbacks are where the the content is related.

So What Should I Do about Trackback Spam?

When receiving a spammy trackback, you can do a few things. The first choice would be to delete the trackback, keeping your comments area clean and spamless. The second choice would be to leave it there, giving the spammer the linkback he wants while lowering your reputation and respect as you link to sites with questionable content. The third option is what I’m recommending for you to do, and that is to delete edit the trackback and delete the link, but leave the trackback there. (Example here). This gives you content in your comments as sometimes even spammy trackbacks are related in very small ways while also lightening up your comments area, but at the same time taking away the linkback to the spammy site. Thus saving you reputation and reputation from going down the drain.

Every blogger and webmaster loves content and activity within the comments of a post, but hate giving out links to spammers in the comments area.  The third method I suggested is the best way to deal with trackback spam. It gives you all the advantages of a legitimate trackback while neutralizing it’s disadvantages.

Word of advice, only use the 3rd method which I highlighted above when the trackback is not complete spam. As even the method above won’t help you if the trackback is complete spam. Also, you can use the method which I shared to edit even legitimate trackbacks to stop your pagerank from leaking – yes, it might seem cruel but people do do this .

So from now on, do yourself a favour and instead of totally deleting the trackback, edit the track and remove it’s hyperlink. What do you guys think about trackback spam and the method of which I shared on how to deal with it?

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Which One Earns More, Nuffnang Or Advertlets?

On the 8 of August 2008, which is this month, I wrote about how I was going to try Adverlets out on my blog. Well, today after about 16 days of running Advertlets advertisements on my blog, I must say that it is already earning me more than Nuffnang advertisements.

First of all, I need to say that both Nuffnang and Advertlets are not my main source of income on Drett.com. My main source of income is private advertising deals. The reason why I can’t earn much from Nuffnang and Adverlets is because of my low traffic count from countries like Singapore and Malaysia as most of my traffic comes for the United States of America. Actually, the traffic I get is far below what I wish I am getting, but I’m working on that and that story is for another time.

Well anyway. I gave up my Glitterati membership in Nuffnang so that I could show Advertlets advertisement on Drett. In this period of about 16 days, I have earned a little less than a ringgit. RM0.903 to be exact. And in this same period of time, I have earned RM0.00 from Nuffnang. Yes, totally nothing.

My stats below are for my Advertlets advertisements. Note that some days the impressions are very low and far below average because some days my site was down for more than half a day due to me trying to upgrade and fix out the kinks with the current theme.

By counting the cents I earn everyday, I have earned a grand total of RM0.903.

I have totally nothing to show for Nuffnang. Nothing at all. I didn’t get any global band advertisements (which are the cost per click advertisements aka CPC advertisements), nor even a band 1 advertisement within this 16 days period.

I calculated how many days it was before I could expect payment from Advertlets, and by assuming that my average income a day would RM0.15 a day, I would have to wait about 1.8 more years before I reach the minimum payout of RM100. Not a very pleasant thought.

So far since I started using Advertlets on the 18th of June, I have earned a sum of RM1.442 while I earned RM1.25 from Nuffnang since I signed up which was on the 20th of June.

Yup, thats RM1.442 of my Advertlets earnings you are looking at.

And now you are looking at all RM1.25 of my Nuffnang earnings. Quite pathetic.

As I said before, luckily Advertlets or Nuffnang isn’t my main source of income, otherwise I seriously won’t earn anything at all .

Having been a Nuffnang Glitterati member before, I know both it’s benefits and advantages, and now I’m considering becoming a TITAN member of Adverlets. TITAN stands for This Is The Advertlets Network which is what exclusive members of Advertlets are called (exclusive members of Nuffnang are called Glitterati members). Yes, I just might consider applying to be one just so I can compare whether Advertlets or Nuffnang earns more money.

What do you guys think? Does Nuffnang or Advertlets earn you more money? Post your comments below and share your knowledge with us.

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How To Highlight Author Comments In Wordpress Without Using Plugins

You’ve seen blogs where the author’s comments are highlighted, and I bet you would have thought that it was pretty cool. Besides the cool factor, highlighting your (authors) comments can be extremely useful as it helps you build your authority factor and helps first time visitors know who the administrator is.

Having seen how useful highlighted author comments were in other blogs, I set out in search for the solution that will let me do the same. Yes, I found many plugins to do the job, however, I don’t like installing Wordpress plugins for unnecessary things like this which can be hard coded into the template.

After looking around a bit I found Matt Cutt’s post really clued me in on what to do. Matt Cutt’s version works, however I think the way I did it below is easier to understand. What I did was to insert a php code into the comments template that checked every comment to see whether the author ID was 1 (It is 1 for me as my author ID is 1, most blogs should leave it at 1) and if it were to print the words authorcomment, if it wasn’t it would print visitorcomment.

Note: I check the comment to the author ID, so if your author ID is not 1, please change the number to your own author ID. Also, this method is not the only method by which you can hard code author highlighting into the template, but this is one of the simplest.

First of all, open your comments.php template, then look for the block of code below. It won’t be exactly the same for different themes, but it should be close enough though.

<?php if ($comments) : ?>
    <h3 id="comments"><?php comments_number(’No Responses’, ‘One Response’, ‘% Responses’ );?> to &#8220;<?php the_title(); ?>&#8221;</h3>

    <ol class="commentlist">
        <!–the beginning of one comment–>
    <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

        <li>
            <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
            <br />

            <small><?php comment_date(’F jS, Y’) ?> at <?php comment_time() ?></small>

            <?php comment_text() ?>
            <div class="divider"></div>

        </li>

    <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

    </ol>

After that look for the <li> before the start of your comments and replace it with:

<li class="<?php if ($comment->user_id == 1) echo "authorcomment"; else echo "visitorcomment" ?>">

The end result should be below:

<?php if ($comments) : ?>
    <h3 id="comments"><?php comments_number(’No Responses’, ‘One Response’, ‘% Responses’ );?> to &#8220;<?php the_title(); ?>&#8221;</h3>

    <ol class="commentlist">
        <!–the beginning of one comment–>
    <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

        <li class="<?php if ($comment->user_id == 1) echo "authorcomment"; else echo "visitorcomment" ?>">
            <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
            <br />

            <small><?php comment_date(’F jS, Y’) ?> at <?php comment_time() ?></small>

            <?php comment_text() ?>
            <div class="divider"></div>

        </li>

    <?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

    </ol>

OK, now with that done, all you need to do is to assign a style via css to style up all comments with the class “authorcomment”. Open up style.css template, then insert this line:

li.authorcomment{background:#000000;color:#ffffff;}

The line above gives a black background and white text to all of the your comments. If you want to change it, just change the code in between the 2 curly brackets and you’ll be fine.

Go change your theme now to get these cool highlighted author comments . Do you guys do it differently? Any suggestions?

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Make Money Online From Your Website With Backlinks.com – A Text Link Broker

One of the easiest way to make money online from their website is selling text links. Text links are usually bought by other people who are willing to pay to help boost the PageRank their site. Although selling text links is easy as it does not require much work on your part to display the text link, it requires a lot of work to find people who want to buy text links. Backlinks.com is a text link broker which acts as a middleman who sells text links for you but who also takes a cut of your earnings.

Backlinks.com will allow you to generate additional income on top of all your other revenue streams (Google Adsense, Kontera etc) without doing any work. All you need to do is just add a special code given to you in your template and whenever anyone buys text links on your site from Backlinks.com it will automatically appear on your site. Backlinks.com only allows you to sell text links on web pages that have a minimum PageRank of 1, so these links are not site-wide but just limited to the page which it was bought from.

For the service they provide, Backlinks.com takes away 50% of the earnings, which means that if you earn $50.00 from it, you’ll only recieve $25.00 (yes, I know it’s a high percentage). Backlinks.com sends out payment through PayPal on the 1st of every month.

These are the rates for web pages depending on PageRank:

You will be paid the following monthly rates for text links. Rates are paid per month per text link.

PageRank (PR) 1 homepage $.50 , subpage $.50
PageRank (PR) 2 homepage $1 , subpage $1
PageRank (PR) 3 homepage $2 , subpage $1.50
PageRank (PR) 4 homepage $3 , subpage $2
PageRank (PR) 5 homepage $4.50 , subpage $3.50
PageRank (PR) 6 homepage $12.50 , subpage $10
PageRank (PR) 7 homepage $30 , subpage $25
PageRank (PR) 8 homepage $75 , subpage $50

So far within this week, I have sold 3 text links on my PR 2 homepage, giving me a $3 into my account. Yes, I know this isn’t much and the links are of low quality (you can control to a certain extent what kinds of links that are allowed to be shown) but still this is money coming in without me doing anything.

Sign up now! (It’s my affiliate link, I would be really grateful if you used it )

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation plays a very big part in determining how well your site ranks in the search engines results. Well, ok, maybe not that big, but as this topic covers a lot of areas I decided to create one whole category for it.

Here in this “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)” category, I’ll be posting articles and news about the newest things in search engine optimizing your site. What I write here will be mostly for the Google search engine and Yahoo search engine as they are both the benchmark search engines around, but I believe what I share here will work for other search engines too .

So, I now officially open the “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)” category.

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