Snoskred – Life in the Country

Last week Matt Cutts posted about the Kitt Inbox, which is a very plush looking inbox for cats that you can attach to your desk. I sent the link to The Other Half, who thought it was a great idea. This week he discovered a version that cost us.. well.. nothing.. because it is the lid of a 5 ream box of paper. Except it does take up a little desk space.

I don’t know why cats have an obsession with boxes – or even if all cats do, but ours certainly can’t resist a box. They have all manner of comfortable places to sleep yet they will choose a box over any of the comfortable places anytime, even if they don’t quite fit inside it.

And yes, I will post something non-kitty related soon – things are a tad hectic at the moment. I’ve done a couple of new websites for people this week – Artists Blog for Artoholic from the Aussie Bloggers Forum – Cindy made her own header and it is gorgeous. I like the theme with the white on the sides, too.

Kin’s Money for Kin who I knew previous to the Aussie Bloggers Forum and who recently became a moderator there. Kin had found the little piggy which inspired the text in the header – I am crazy about it. Whenever I create a new header for someone it is like a very intoxicating drug – I can’t get enough of looking at it for a little while. I love the texture of the gold text. I tried to make the gold a little darker but then it didn’t quite match the pig and it never looked quite as good as that shade of gold you see there now.

While working on Kin’s Money, I discovered just how lucky I was to find this Freedom Green theme right off the bat because I went looking for a different theme to use. We found one and we tried using it only to find halfway through that the middle sidebar was not widgetized. The same thing had happened to me with a theme that Artoholic Cindy wanted to use only that one was completely non-widgetized.

I’ve done countless websites with the Freedom Green theme now – below you will see links to a few of them – and it never gets old for me – but I think it always looks slightly different and new because I always customise it and change the colors. In this case I changed the text for Kin and I like the different text so I may experiment with a few different fonts here on my blog.

Gemisht (purple nav bar)

LighteningOnline (a gorgeously raspberry color)

The Nutcracker Ski Club (I reversed the nav bar on this one)

Miss Amelia Smith (orange nav bar)

Kin’s Home Of Slightly Cracked Dreams (lovely and orange all over!)

Birdwing Therapies (love the green and gold)

Cherry Blossom Adventures (pink! And then some! I love the pink fade along the white edges)

Aussie Bloggers Blog (I still adore the header I made for this, it never gets old)

I don’t think I missed anyone out who is using this theme but let me know if I did. As you can see by looking at the sites above, the Freedom Green theme is highly customisable. And I know this theme like the back of my hand now – I will always recommend using it to people simply because I know it well enough to be able to trouble shoot.

Some of you may remember a while ago I released a collection of metallic RSS Feed Icons. I have now released the Green Collection.

The Green Collection – click on the image for a larger view.

Download the .zip file – RSS Feed Icons

From time to time I find a new Australian blog which makes me get all tingly in my outer limbs with excellent writing, great design, amazing photography or just plain old fashioned humor. I think we Australians don’t give a lot of credit to ourselves as writers, photographers or bloggers in general. Many of us respect *other* Australian bloggers but we try to diminish ourselves as bloggers. It’s a uniquely Australian trait to say “Look what (insert someone else here) did” while completely overlooking what we ourselves did.

I have been to the majority of the top 100 Aussie blogs. I’d say 99% of the top Aussie bloggers are community orientated people, willing to support others in their efforts. That is one thing I love about the Australian Blogs Community.

Today I want to tell you about two new blogs I found after Neerav Bhatt sent me an email asking if I could give a heads up to voters in Australia – they needed to register to vote fast if they weren’t registered already due to changes in the law. I know I was not the only Australian blogger to receive that email. That in itself is utterly unique. Going out of ones way to help others is something I love to see and I wish there was more of it in the world today.

Another thing I love to see is a good About Me page – and Neerav does not disappoint. Bloggers, I have seen a lot of about me pages. Some of them are ok. Some of them short, uninformative and I leave the page feeling none the wiser about the blogger – it’s called an ABOUT me page! Go have a look at this one – Everything you ever wanted to know about Neerav Bhatt – and then take a look at your own, and think about it carefully.

Looking at this about me page I can think of a few things I need to add to mine. I’m even thinking about *gulp* adding a pic. It would be an older one for security reasons but I think ya’all would be ok with it. It is wonderful to know so much about someone before even *reading* their blog so well done Neerav on the about me page!

Checking out your books I see we both love James Herriot. And two of your favourite movies are also.. my favourite movies. The Shawshank Redemption and Office Space. Something else we have in common is photography (see Neerav’s picasa albums here ) and some of your photos are simply stunning! You have gone one step further than me and created some free computer desktop wallpaper . Take a look at this photo -

You should click on the thumbnail or else you may not see what is special about this image. Being a photographer myself I know that a shot like this is a matter of being in the right place at the right time as well as about a hundred other factors which can easily ruin a good shot quicker than you can blink.

Neerav has two blogs and I knew I had seen The Road Less Travelled (59th on the Top 100 Aussie Blogs List) before because of that stunning header graphic. The Rambling Thoughts Blog (47th on the Top 100 Aussie Blogs List) was new to me but every article on the front page was well written, enjoyable and extremely informative.

I love it when I visit a blog and find a piece of information I didn’t know I wanted but once I have it I get all excited about it. There was several such pieces of information on both blogs. There’s a great post about Australian Political blogs, some of which I have bookmarked for later exploration. I’m so out of the loop when it comes to commercial television, I had no idea Shaun Micallef has a new show. I have recently spotted a few good episodes of The Sideshow with Paul Mcdermott, I’d be interested to see a blog post with your thoughts on that.

Let’s talk color schemes and themes for a moment. Neerav has used my two favourite colors, green on The Road Less Travelled which has two sidebars and blue on Rambling Thoughts Blog which has one sidebar. Both look very professional but The Road Less Travelled is extra crispy and fresh thanks to the green. I’ve said many times that green is my favourite color to use on a website. More and more sites are starting to use it. I think Rambling Thoughts could use a tricked out header graphic like The Road Less Travelled has – just to make it stand out as a blog.

The policy of writing one to two quality posts each week rather than being just another blog in the blogosphere echo chamber commenting on the same things everyone else is writing about is an excellent idea. You write beautiful and informative articles – the travel ones on the road less travelled are especially excellent – I did not know the Sydney public transport planner existed and I’ll be using that myself. Your info about getting around Adelaide is also great – having lived there all my life. And one of the things I miss most is the Museum there – free and fantastic.

The only thing missing on both the blogs is an I Reply policy. I think Neerav could delight his commentors if he replied to their comments regularly – I have seen that he replies from time to time. I try to reply to the comments on every post I write. I don’t always get there – and sometimes it takes me a few days to get back to them as I want to let people have time to comment – but committing to doing it has worked for me here on this blog. You’re not posting daily so this will be a lot easier for you to do than it is for me to do.

People love it when you reply to them and you have the notify me tick box – a lot of people (me included) will tick that and come back to comment a second or even third time on a post. I spotted a post where you did reply – Photos from Outback South Australia, The Red Centre and Tropical Top End – and I love how your comment shows up in a dark green box.

How do you make an RSS feed for photos, though? A how to post on that would be wonderful – maybe you could do one as a part of our Tuesday Think Tank sometime? We’ll make the topic photography.

Today on Think Tank Tuesday I’m taking a look at No Follow and Do Follow and how these relate to blogs and spam, and Sephy is going to let you know how to turn no follow off on Blogger, WordPress, and various other kinds of blogs. It is a lot easier than you think, you’ll be glad to know!

So what is NoFollow All About?

Most blogs come with no follow installed on the comments section automatically. This was originally done to prevent link spammers gaining anything from their spammy efforts. Unfortunately nofollow does not work – nofollow blogs still get spam comments.

That means anytime someone comments on your blog their link is not followed by the search engines. The commentor does not receive a link back on either Technorati or Google or Yahoo or any of the other search engines.

Is It Fair To Your Commentors?

By making a link no follow, you’re effectively saying to the search engines – I don’t trust this link. Given that most of us do actually trust the links of our commentors, this is not a Good Thing.

Choose Not To Give Link Juice -

When you have a blog, you can choose to make certain things no follow. For example, if I wanted to link to someone in a post but I did not want the search engines to see that link, I would put in a bit of code that turns the link into a no follow link. Why would I want to do that?

Link Bait -

Sometimes bloggers post controversial things in order to get links back to their blog. I can name a few who do this regularly. If you feel a blogger is link baiting but you still want to discuss their post there is an easy way you can make the link no follow.

Sephy has shown you how you can do this in his post on this topic – Say No To NoFollow, it is simple and easy to do.

You will still be giving their blog traffic if anyone clicks on the link, but it is better to do that than leave your readers wondering what the heck you’re talking about – and much better than giving the blogger what they are looking for by being controversial, which is backlinks to their blog. Don’t reward them by giving them link juice.

Links Mean $$$ To Some -

Why do bloggers link bait? To some bloggers, backlinks can mean money. The more back links your blog has, the higher ranking you get on Technorati, the higher your page rank, the higher price you can charge advertisers.

What Is Do Follow?

The Do Follow movement is basically people who have decided they want their commentors links to be followed by the search engines. These Do Follow bloggers have taken the time to remove no follow from their comments sections. Depending on what kind of blog they have this can be an easy task or a difficult one.

Sephy has explained how to make your blog do follow with instructions for Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Movable Type and some others.in his companion post to this one, make sure to read it. Here is the link again if you have not already opened it in a new window or tab – Say No To NoFollow

Will This Increase Spam?

In a word, no. I was getting spammed before I became do follow, and I have been spammed since. What will add to your chances of being spammed more often is by joining one of the Do Follow link lists that exist on the internet. These are targeted often by spammers looking for a way to build backlinks fast.

The Bumpzee Community -

There is a No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community at Bumpzee. Being a member of this community is worthwhile if you are a do follow blog because your posts go out on the RSS feed for other do follow readers to view. It has meant more traffic to my blog.

I believe three times since I joined the community, which was some months ago now, I have been spammed by people who came directly here from the Bumpzee community. These are the paid commentors. Their comments are easy to spot and easily deleted. So as far as I am concerned the issue of being spammed by people who know you are do follow is not much of a problem for me.

What If I Get Spammed?

You can easily turn no follow back on – but that won’t stop the spam. Spam is a problem we all have to deal with here on the internet. We just have to be adults about it, set a comments policy for ourselves, and then follow it.

Since I put in a comments policy on the page where people leave a comment, I have only been spammed once. The paid comments people seem to have got the message – it is a waste of their time to comment here and they won’t get paid for the comment because I delete it quickly. If you can do the same thing, you can keep your blog spam free.

How Can I Tell When It’s Spam?

The number one give away is the link they are using. When I see a comment that is possibly spam, the first thing I do is copy the link and take the link over to Technorati. For example, this is one of the comment spammers that has been here recently – on Technorati and another one – and as soon as you search for the URL you can see they have a lot of recent reactions with different names – Tom Paine, Lais Edwards, Richard Andrews, Clebsch Gordon, etc.

Why It Works -

Looking at the backlinks, some of the bloggers I most respect got caught out by these spammers. There’s a lot of familiar names and blogs there. I didn’t have the time to email or comment on all the posts, otherwise I would have.

The two blogs mentioned above now have medium level authorities on Technorati – (one has an authority of 51) (two has an authority of 65). You’ll note I am not linking to the blogs themselves, only to Technorati. I do not want to give them any link juice.

Team Up With Fellow Bloggers -

The major mistake these spammers made was – they visited Sephy’s blog not long after visiting mine, and left similar comments. Sephy and I discussed them on Skype and figured out it was spam, and then deleted them.

Don’t be afraid to contact a fellow blogger who has received a comment you suspect is spam and ask what their thoughts are on it. Sephy posted about it here – Paid Comments Not Allowed

Search The Name or URL-

Lucia spotted what was going on and wrote a post about it here – Jimmy Spam (& SEO Tip)! and many bloggers have been finding out it was spam via the search engines because of this post.

Post About It Yourself -

If spam has become an issue on your blog, it could be worthwhile posting about it so that other bloggers can be aware of it. When they google the names you keep seeing as spam, they will find your post and then they can delete the spam as well – and if they read your post, when those names turn up on their blog they can hit delete fast.

Just make sure not to give any link juice to the spammers – you can make individual links no follow easily (See Sephy’s Post for info on how) so please do so when referring to the links spammers leave, or use the name only, don’t put a link in, like Lucia did.

Moderation?

From time to time all bloggers find themselves switching to moderated comments. I’ve had to do it here, when trolls have arrived. Using moderation takes all the fun out of it for them. You usually don’t have to leave it on for too long before they give up and go somewhere else to troll.

You can also use moderation to combat spam and this is a tactic some bloggers are trying out recently. If you are available most of the time to moderate comments, you may wish to try this but be aware – it tends to stifle discussion. And what happens when you sleep? Comments stay unmoderated for hours at a time. ;(

Moderation After The Fact -

I tend to stick with a moderation afterwards policy here. If I spot a comment which is inappropriate, unacceptable or spam, it is quickly deleted. Sometimes not quickly enough because the search spiders are here fairly often. So they may get a some link juice if I’m not on the ball.

Trusted People -

If you have a couple of people you really trust who live in different timezones to you, you may choose to make them an administrator on your blog. This gives them the power to moderate comments. You discuss with them what is unacceptable, and they keep an eye out, deleting anything which would be against your policy, or anything which is clearly spam.

What About Captcha?

Blogger users will be familiar with Captcha word verification, it looks like this – The reason it is exists is to stop spam bots posting comments on your blog. However it could be stopping regular human people from posting on your blog. You only need to turn word verification on when you’re being targeted by a spam bot – as in you’ll be getting a boatload of comments in a very short amount of time – and this will stop the spam bot from posting more comments. May I recommend you turn it off in the meantime?

Julie Pippert recently posted about Captcha and if you read her post you will see you might be missing out on comments if you’re using it. I have turned word verification off here for now, we’ll see how it goes..

The Bottom Line -

Spam is an issue for all of us. We get it in our email. We get spammed in our comments section. Unless you are being targeted in a major way and receiving hundreds of spam comments a day, it’s not that big a deal to hit delete. Have a good comments policy, make sure it is visible on the screen where people leave comments (blogger users – find out how to display your comments policy) and be vigilant in deleting anything you suspect of being spam.

Further Reading -

13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck I agree with the points, especially points 2, 3 and 5.

Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks – Andy is the manager of the No No Follow community on Bumpzee. This post has a lot of fantastic info, worth a read.

Here’s Why You Should Add Dofollow To Your Blog Design David Airey expresses why he has chosen to become do follow and I can’t put it any better than he did in this article – especially this direct quote – “I want to give you every reward I can for your valued comments”.

Give a little link love say no to nofollow remove the link condoms Rob, I love the concept of link condoms! This post contains some very interesting quotes from people at Google and Yahoo – worth reading.

I Follow Randa Clay created the Do Follow logos that you see around the place, here you can get them in different colors to suit your blog.

Bumpzee No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community – You can join the Bumpzee Do Follow community here if you are a do follow blogger.

I Reply, I Follow, I STALK!! Very interesting thoughts on both I Reply and I Follow.

Over To You -

If you liked this post, give it a stumble so other readers can find it.

What are your thoughts on spam? Have you been spammed on your blog? Are you a Do Follow blog, and if not will you become one after reading this? Feel free to leave any comments – as long as they’re not spam!