Snoskred - Life in the Country

According to my various stat gathering programs, there are on average a good couple of hundred of you reading this blog via your feed readers daily. That does not count those subscribed by email. Today I would like to give you an excuse to de-lurk and say hi.

Please Drop By And Comment! 

I am about to update my reader and blogroll over the next week or two, and I would love to add the blogs of any of my blog readers, so if you are reading please comment with a link to your blog so I can return the favour and read/link to your blog.

If you are on my blogroll already, make sure to comment so I know you’re still reading - I would hate to delete anyone by accident. I do have to make some serious cuts in my reader as I am up to over 200 blogs, so I am going to be deleting a fair few blogs.

I am still procrastinating - cutting blogs from my reader is not a job I enjoy doing. I love adding blogs, which is how I keep ending up with more blogs than I can keep up with.

There is a blog I know where the blogger regularly has these dummy spits about people not commenting on her post quickly enough. As in, within a couple of hours of a post being posted. When she spits the dummy she posts something basically accusing everyone of ignoring her, or saying that she’s going to quit blogging. Then a few hours later she deletes that post and replaces it with a post where she apologises for spitting the dummy. It is so regular it is almost like a cycle - if I bothered to go back and look I could probably tell you exactly how many days are in between each dummy spit. Some of you reading this may know who I am talking about if you read the same blog.

There’s a bunch of people who read her blog who are essentially enabling her in this cycle - they comment with things hoping to make the blogger feel better. I spotted it as a cycle early on and I called her on it. Ever since then she hasn’t taken my comments very well. I actually stopped commenting entirely on that blog a few months ago. I kept reading, hoping that she would eventually realise it herself and get the help she needs, whatever help that might be.

But then the cycle repeated itself again, and I came out of comment hiding to say exactly what I felt - though I can’t repeat the comment exactly to you now because surprise surprise - my comment got deleted, and all the comments on that post also got deleted. In fact comments got removed from that post entirely. So I emailed her to say hey, I can’t believe you deleted those comments, I give up - now I am going to unsubscribe and stop reading. I just wanted her to know I was done. I was very surprised by one of the comments that came back to me.

She told me “Those comments were for me - and I will do whatever I choose with them”.

So I didn’t reply - I don’t think I even know what to say to that kind of ego - and I mulled this over for a little bit. I wonder what you think - once you press submit on the comment form, does your comment “belong” to the person you wrote it to? Are they then allowed to delete them, or remove them, or even edit them to say whatever they like?

I would never assume that your comments were “for me” and therefore I can do what I choose with them. You leave a comment partly “for me” and partly “for you” because you want to have your say on something. Sure, if your comment is offensive or contains swearing (which my comment to this blogger did not) then I might have to edit it or delete it as per my comments policy (which says - Snoskred reserves the right to delete any comment which is vulgar, contains profanity, or is generally offensive. Please note that this occurs very rarely - it is only if you use a swear word or if you were to use a word which resulted in unwanted search engine traffic.) But that happens so rarely.. and I would always choose to edit out the offending words rather than delete entirely.

For me, deleting stuff you wrote on your blog is a deal breaker. If you can’t stand by your own words then you shouldn’t be blogging them. I’ve also known people who have deleted things on forums and I have lost all respect for them. I have known bloggers who did it and I unsubscribed. The only things I have ever deleted from this blog were my old paid reviews - however those do still appear on the old blogspot blog where I was paid to put them, so they aren’t deleted from the blogosphere, they’re just not over here.

Sometimes it amazes me how deluded people can be about themselves. This person actually thinks that people are sitting out there in the blogosphere waiting for her to write something so they can all arrive and comment on it. I think we all know that people have lives, and they are generally living them. I’m not going to be upset when I don’t get any comments on a post. I don’t have that kind of insanely low self esteem that comments = my worth in the world.

Deleting things helps people stay deluded, because they never have to take responsibility for what they’ve said or done and people can’t go back and grab quotes and say here you are, this is where you did this before. It also helps the commentors stay and enable, because they don’t get to read what the person said and they can’t spot the pattern.

Sephyroth and I were once members of a forum where there was this lady (someone over the age of 50, I might add!) from Canada who had to have drama in her life. Once a month she would pull some kind of stunt - whether it was something she did herself, or whether she caused an over-reaction to something someone else did. It got so that we could predict the exact date that the next “drama” would occur. Both of us ended up leaving the forum in the end. We got tired of the drama.

This blogger reminds me a little bit of that situation - I think she feels the need for validation and she feels that comments give her that validation. But imagine if you were a reader being held hostage by this need - some readers would feel like they had to be there regularly to make sure they could comment on anything that has been posted. Some readers would put up with it for a while and then drift away.

Some readers - like me - would feel the need to point out the obvious pattern. But you can only point it out so many times before you realise the person involved is getting off on it - and has no intention of changing the behaviour. So I’m done reading that blog. It’s not like I don’t have enough in my reader already.

I wonder what your thoughts are about who comments belong to once you hit submit. The comments section is open, so feel free to comment.

Today’s Tuesday Think Tank is all about Site Meters. I’m talking about how unreliable they are, how readers of your blog can stop them from working, how you measure your worth as a blogger, and possible ways you could increase your traffic and make sure readers stick around once they get to your blog.

Sephy has written a companion piece to this post - Track Your Visitors with Google Analytics which you should check out.

Site Meters Are A Free Service -

It’s rare on the internet to find something that is actually free. Blogger is one thing that is free, and it provides you with a lot of options and things you can do at no cost whatsoever. But if you stop and consider for a moment how much it costs to provide this service to any man - and his dog or cat! - who want to blog.. it costs bandwidth, it takes up CPU time (computer processing unit, your computer has one but so do all the computers at the other end when you look at something on the internet).

Most people who run a website have to pay to run it. They have to pay for server space. That could be as little as $7 a year but the more people who visit your site, the higher that cost can increase. Most of my stuff which is on Fraudstars is being hosted on a $400AUD a month dedicated server. We share it with a friend, and we pay towards the cost of running it.

Consider The Source -

Free can sometimes mean you get what you pay for - i.e. nothing. If you consider these services which are used by so many bloggers but also websites across the www, it takes an enormous amount of “internet juice” (bandwidth, CPU, etc) to run these things. So these people are supposed to provide you with a great service which *costs* them money to provide it and is always reliable and always works, for free? Err, are we asking a bit too much here?

Things Happen -

Servers go down regularly, as any good internet host will tell you. You cannot expect that the information given to you by a free site tracking service is going to be 100% accurate. Unless you want to sit there and check it is working 24/7, which would be a great waste of your time.

These sites also have customers who are paying for the service and if anything goes wrong the first people who they will look after is their paying customers. It makes sense from a business point of view. We cannot expect this free service to be accurate. You can use it as a guide, but that is where it should end.

There May Be Delays -

The information available to you may not be live information. There can be delays - sometimes up to 24 hours or more - with information being tracked and translated. If you post something and then check your counter and think “Nobody’s reading my post!” you may have incorrect information. There could be 50 people reading your post. You might see that days later in your tracker - or maybe not at all, if there was an outage.

It Matters Where You Put It -

If you put the code for your tracker at the very top of your sidebar, you will get different results to putting it lower down on your sidebar. If the code is right at the bottom of the page and it is not Javascript, everything on the page has to load before a “visit” gets counted.

I’ve been trying to find out for certain whether Javascript loads all the scripts on a page at the same time, or one by one in order and not having any luck, so if you know about that can you leave a comment?

People Can Hit Stop -

If your page load takes too long, most browsers have the “Stop Loading This Page” option. You would be surprised how many people use it and how quickly they use it, too. If they stop the page loading before your counter script runs? No data will be sent re their visit.

It Matters What Kind Of Code -

Some trackers are Javascript. Some internet users (myself included) use a Firefox extension called “No Script”. This actually stops any Javascript from loading in a page unless I (the user) personally authorise it. This means if I visit your blog for the first time, and you have a bunch of Javascripts running, they won’t load.

Take for example Statcounter. I have approved statcounter Javascript for any site I visit. That means if I visit a site the Statcounter will load, but none of the other Javascripts will. As an internet user this gives me a LOT more control over how I am viewing the web, but it can also mean my visits to your site won’t be tracked at all.

Why No Script?

I use it because there have been security problems with javascript from time to time, and I sometimes visit websites created by internet scammers. It is a quick and easy way I can tell what is running on a page without checking the source code, and anything I have not previously approved will be unable to run until I do approve it. Here’s what a page looks like when I view it with No Script - Click for a bigger view. You can see that a little yellow bar runs across the bottom of the page, telling me which scripts I have previously approved are running. It also tells me how many scripts in total are running on the page and when I click on options (the screenshot shows me clicking on options) it gives me more information. I can choose to forbid any of those approved javascripts at any time.

Results Can Vary Widely -

I run two site meters on the site currently - Google Analytics and Statcounter. Feedburner also has a counter built in. Last Wednesday September the 5th -

Statcounter shows - visits 419, page views 861

Google Analytics shows - visits 349, page views 802

Feedburner shows - visits 323, page views 810

Do you see now how these are a bit unreliable? That is a huge difference, especially given two of the scripts (Statcounter and Google Analytics) are right next to each other in the sidebar. Which one of the above should I believe? How can I know how many people actually visited my page?

Don’t Invest Yourself -

If you define your worth as a blogger in how many people visit your site and you are relying on these free tracking tools, you are setting yourself up for heart break. For no good reason. Site Meters should only be used as a guide to the general traffic on your blog, and not as the bible of internet usage or any kind of measure of how many people are reading you.

How Do You Measure?

How can anyone possibly measure their worth as a blogger? At the end of the day, it could boil down some or all of the following -

If you are happy with what you are writing
(if not, work harder on the writing)

If you are happy with your blog template
(if not, test out a new one and consider changing it)

If you are happy with the look of your blog
(if not, take a good look at it, remove anything you don’t like)

If you are happy with your header graphic
(if not, create a new one. If you don’t have the tools, ask for help from other bloggers, run a competition on your blog to have your readers create a new one for you)

If you are happy with the amount of comments you receive
(if not, network. Get out there and meet new people, comment on their blogs, they will comment back)

If you are happy with the quality of your content
(if not, learn more about writing, edit, improve, read this- 10 Easy Ways To Improve Your Blog Writing. )

If you are happy with the relationships you have built with other bloggers
(if not, work on building relationships with other bloggers)

If you are happy with the amount of links back to you from other bloggers
(if not, link to them more and you will find they link back to you, a weekly wrap up is one good way to achieve this)

If you are not happy with any of the above, these are all things you can work on and improve.

You’re in charge -

You can create positive change in any area of your blogging. If I can do it, you can do it. Anyone can do it. Daisy The Curly Cat is doing it, even though it must be hard to type with kitty paws. Love your work, Daisy.

Bloggers, don’t make excuses for your inaction. If you don’t have the time and energy to put into your blog, that is one thing. People have real lives. We all have to do the chores, etc. Some of us have jobs to go to. Some of us have kids and family. There is only a certain amount of time and energy we can each devote to blogging. We have to accept that, and be ok with it.

But..

If you DO have the time and energy and you waste it by constantly checking your blog stats instead of networking and building relationships with other bloggers and the zillion things you can do to improve your blog- that IS something you can change.

Consider taking some time to learn to manage time better. To begin with, you could try setting yourself a target - for example, comment on 5 new blogs a day - and then set out to hit that target each and every day. Be pro-active and you will see results Be inactive and you’ll get exactly what you put in - nothing.

There Are Ways -

To improve the traffic to your blog. See the article - 75 Ways to Increase Your Site’s Traffic - by Tay from Super Blogging for some great ideas. Try some of them out. If they don’t work, try something different.

They Say -If you build it, they will come. I have found this to be partially true. They won’t come unless you tell them where it is first. It is like throwing a party and not inviting anyone, yet expecting people to somehow know you’re having a party and find it anyway, and when nobody shows up you fret and get depressed about it. What did you expect? That people are psychic? That they are somehow able to read your thoughts? That people would magically find your blog out of the literally millions of blogs out there on the net?

Stay Positive -

If you look at your stats and find it makes you negative, unhappy, or inspires you to write posts lamenting the lack of readers and traffic, stop right there.

It is one thing to say to your readers - how can I improve this blog - and actually listen to them when they tell you, and make the changes they suggest. That’s fine, and something we should all do as bloggers from time to time.

It is another thing to throw a full blown tantrum which makes the people who do read and are loyal to you feel like they aren’t worth anything to you as readers. Vent elsewhere. Never do it publicly on your blog.

Don’t Be Negative -

You may remember me writing - 14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog. As a blogger, it is also not good to -

- engage in bitch brawls with other bloggers (not only will the blogger feel attacked but their readers will too, it’s one way to make many enemies at once!) or spend time attacking other bloggers in a negative manner
- post whiny, whinging posts regularly (more often than positive content)
- post things which made your readers feel physically ill (keep your poop and vomit stories away from me!)

Some Things Should Never Be Blogged About.

You know how we all have topics we simply refuse to write about? For some of us it’s sex, religion, drugs, rock and roll, bowel movements, whatever. I suggest it is in a bloggers best interest to add “lack of blog traffic” to the list of topics they will never ever blog about. But feel free to blog up a storm when traffic is good or exceeds your expectations.

I Know This Is True -

Once they arrive, if you do not build it, refine it, work on it, tweak it, make it better, make it load fast, make it pleasing to their eye, and create good content, they won’t stick around long. It’s no easy task and it requires you to be the master of many different subjects - or at least to know a little bit about them.

Blogger can let you down-

Sometimes my page load is slow because of Blogger - again we’re back to what you get for free. Sometime in the next few months this blog will be moving to Wordpress, and I will have a lot more control over things like that. It will cost me money but I’m worth it - and so are my readers.

Further Reading -

I want to draw your attention to the section - Bloggers Are Helpful - in my sidebar for your further reading today. There’s a lot of great posts in there from bloggers that can help you to improve your blogging.

Over To You - What are your thoughts on blog traffic and site meters? Have you ever run any kinds of tests to investigate how accurate they are? How many times a day do you check your stats?

If you liked this post, give it a Stumble.

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!