Posts Tagged ‘spammers’

Why and How to Ping Your WordPress Blog

October 30th, 2009

WPDaddy keeps on providing you with helpful tips in order to simplify your efforts and help you get the most pleasure and benefits from your everyday writing. Today we are going to touch upon the easiest and the most convenient way of making your weblog even more popular and profitable - blog pinging. Haven’t heard about it yet? Then learn the following suggestions we have kindly prepared!

Pinging is known among bloggers as an XML-RPC-based push mechanism with the help of which the server is informed about all updates implemented within your blog via an XML-RPC signal. When the ping server receives a signal it creates a list of weblogs which have refreshed their content. The thing is a summary or your full new post will be added to your pinging service database and your post link will appear in this service recent ping page. Sometimes pinged data history is also indexed which provides search traffic.

Simply speaking, blog pinging is about generating traffic to your site and requires minimum time and efforts. All you have to do is subscribe to one of the pinging services and update your weblog content regularly in order for these services to index and rank your site. In such a simple way you will increase your blog rankings and get more traffic to it. You are also allowed to attach your weblog to several blog pinging services but you should be attentive with that - if they notify the same web services your weblog may be considered as spam. In fact there is a lot of cases of a real ping spam so be careful not to be included in the number of blog spammers.

Blog pinging also implies pingback which is one of the linkback types - the ways of getting notification when the user links to one of your documents. This helps you as an author to keep track of the users who link or refer to your articles. Pingback implies an XML-RPC request which is sent from one site to another in case of reference. When your website get a notification signal it goes to the site of the referrer and checks whether a live incoming link exists there. In case the link really exit the pingback will be recorded successfully, thus such mechanism makes pingbacks less spam-prone than trackbacks. As for WordPress, it supports automatic pingbacks which means that all the links in the published article are pinged when the article is submitted.

Blog pinging possesses several great advantages - it is free of charge and highly effective at driving important traffic to your blog. Besides, it is user friendly - most of the pinging services require you to enter only your blog URL and name to start, and seldom your IP address is required additionally. Among the most popular online pinging services are:

Ping-o-Matic!
Pingoat
Pingates
Autopinger

So don’t waste a minute and subscribe to one of the pinging services to increase your blog traffic and earning potential as well as improve your status and credibility!

Posted in Blogging Basics | 1 Comment »

Wordpress Anti-Spam Plugin

October 8th, 2009

If you own a blog you have undoubtedly stumbled upon the problem of spammers damaging your site and for sure have tried to find the most powerful solution to get rid of this problem. Spam is really annoying both for you and your visitors and requires immediate actions against it. This is where the AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin will come in handy.

The AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin for Wordpress is a tool which allows you to block spammers before they can do any harm. The system identifies the spammers by means of checking whether their IP addresses exist in such third parties as the Project Honey Pot, stopforumspam.com database or a local blacklist. Any IP’s and IP ranges can be added to the blacklist or whitelist if necessary. If you consider someone a spammer and want to add him to the local blacklist AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin allows you to do it simply by clicking a link contained in the received email. When a certain IP is blocked a visitor will see a special message explaining why the access was denied.



With AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin potential spammers can be blocked before any content is served and this feature possesses several advantages. First, it saves your bandwidth as well as CPU cycles which means that the spammer is checked and blocked at once before a Wordpress page is built. Secondly, this option will provide you with cleaner website statistics if you use some analytic tools to track the amount of readers which come to your weblog.

Another useful feature of the AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin implies IP Caching System which allows your website to receive more daily visits. The thing is that Stop Forum spam has a limit concerning API calls made every day - up to 5000 calls in total. So if you don’t use your local whitelist and blacklist your blog won’t be allowed to have more than 5000 visits per day. With IP Caching System this limit may be set to 5000 unique visits a day which is much more beneficial.

If you want to see IP’s stored in the database you should check the statistics. In case your site is busy and has a great number of unique visitors you can make use of the “Days to keep in cache” option to control this amount. Once a day the IP’s older than a day you set in the admin panel of the AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin will be removed from the database.

AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin has a certain order of checking the visiting IP’s if you enable the special feature. The plugin is also fully compatible with other anti-spam Wordpress extensions and there is no necessity to remove previous plugins you have installed. So take care of your Wordpress blog protection and don’t neglect using special tools to block spammers which attack your site.

Posted in WordPress Plugins | 1 Comment »