Tag: Blogs

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Are e-Commerce Blogs Considered Spam Blogs by Blogger?

Blogger has a new protocol, if they think that your blog is spam, they lock it. That’s right, lock it.

We have an e-commerce client who happens to sell new issue stamps and we blog three days a week for him about interesting stamps, stamp trivia, stories about stamps, and cool information that you might not know about particular stamps. Blogger has decided that the blog is a “spam blog” as all links point to his website (to products) as do many e-commerce blogs.

As a result, Blogger has threatened to delete the blog if we do not request a review. It has now been two weeks since we requested a review. In fact actually the second time we requested a review as Blogger forgot after one week that we had already requested a review once. There is no time frame on the review, just the threat to delete the blog.

Additionally now to publish a post on the blog, we have to enter a series of letter or numbers into a field, proving that we are real humans not robots posting to this blog. I have to say that this is annoying but to the nth degree. All of our content is unique and not scraped. If there was ever a good reason to move to WordPress, this is it.

I understand that no one wants to read spam, but I feel that Blogger is being heavy handed here. They should have instituted a timely review process before they slapped down interesting content rich blogs!

In fact you can check the blog out to review it for yourself here at The Stamp Collectors Corner.

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WordPress Title Glitch

Have you seen this on your own blog? You create a blog post and then when you publish it and click on the title of the post to see the separate post page you get a message saying the post cannot be found? What causes that? How can you fix it?

First remember that blogs communicate in the world of HTML and each blog post is really an entry in a database. When you use special characters in your blog post title sometimes you mess of the database preventing WordPress from being able to find the post to return it on its own page.

Here are some of the characters that we know cause this to happen: …   –   &

If this happens to you, you cannot just go in and fix the title, the damage has been done. You will need to delete the blog post and totally re-enter it in WordPress.

So if you have been mystified over when and why this happens, now you know!

Have you seen other characters do this on your blog? Leave me a list below to share your knowledge so we can all stay away from those characters too.

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You Really Must Use American Speaking Ghost Bloggers

Here is an excellent case in point. I just got this email in my inbox. I have not edited a single thing, just changed the names and removed the links.

Hi ,
We are Dhxxxxj and Hxxa (names changed to protect their identity from ridicule by Nancy McCord) from Bangalore , India . We work from home as a full time bloggers.
We started blogging since sept2006. We have around 7 blogs on which we write the posts.

Please find the list below

URL list removed to protect the innocent clients who have bought their services

Please let us know if you have any writing opportunities
Thanks
thanks!

Man, that’s scary isn’t it. That could be your ghost blogger if you use just any firm or a possibly a low bidder from a resource like Elance.  I have highlighted the problems so you can tell at a glance where the errors are:

We are Dhxxxxj and Hxxxa from Bangalore , India . We work from home as a full time bloggers.

We started blogging since sept2006. We have around 7 blogs on which we write the posts.

Not only is grammar wrong, spacing is wrong and verb usage is wrong. If you want to spend a lot of time rewriting your blog posts you could pay about $5 a post to get this kind of content. Better yet, you could hire my firm where we employ only American speaking professional college educated writers. 

Many of our writers have college degrees, some several years of college, some that are just short of graduating, and some with higher level college degrees. Sure, you will pay more, but you will not have to waste your time correcting your blog posts, you will build readership because people will understand your message, your blog posts will make a positive impression about your company’s professionalism, and on top of that you will have well written engaging content. The choice is yours.

Find out more about our American speaking premium level ghost blogging program.

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Overriding NoFollow in Links and Comments

I had a commenter recently who brought attention to the fact that he would not comment on my blog again unless I removed the nofollow in comments and commenter links. He made a good point but created an interesting problem that I thought I would blog about today.

First, about a year ago or maybe even more, WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad inserted into their source code an automatic nofollow in the source code of all comments and links left on a blog. There was no setting in the control panels to override this option.

However I for one encourage comments and do not have problems with people linking to a legitimate site if they leave a legitimate comment on my blog. But, how to override this global setting without access to a control panel to do so. Lucia’s Linky Love WordPress plug-in takes care of this problem. You install the plugin and then configure how many times a user needs to comment to have Linky Love turn on a dofollow tag in the comments and enable dofollow in any links they post.

This is an excellent tool to encourage regular visitors to comment and for them to get something back in return for commenting as well as removing spam comments and posters.

I have enabled Lucia’s Linky Love on my blog, so I invite you to be a regular participant and receive link love as a reward!