» wordpress

Matt Cutts in a recent interview said that Google does allow PageRank to flow through noindex pages. If you have pages on your wordpress install that add little value to your readers and you’d like to prevent them from being indexed, then you might want to take that into account.

Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

I looked at my sidebar today and noticed I’d made it to TR10.

Yay me! Thanks to all those who have commented, without them I’d still be on TR0.

I’ve had the tumbleweed plugin on my blog now for about 3 months. Over that time I’ve noticed a steady increase in the comments on my posts.

Whilst this can probably be attributed to the blogs steady growth and readership and of course the fabulous quality of post and content - it may nevertheless have been aided by the little fellow with the cross eyes and the number on his chest reminding me of my progress, ensuring that I worked that little bit harder to stay on track and keep a focus.

Wordpress Plugins for you blog

Wordpress plugins are legion, there are 1000’s of them out there. Here is a selection of some of the ones I use with a little paragraph on some of the reasons why.

Adsense Injection

QSP (Quick Short Post)

Since installing the math comment plugin my spam levels have fallen off of the planet. Akismet hasn’t had a comment now for weeks, which is a prety good show I think.

I’d recommend installing it, its saved me from a chore of checking the mod queue daily, a chore that used to bore me silly.

Last updated:July 3rd 2007  Download it here Ok as promised in a prior post Ive put together a little plugin to calculate your TR ratio.

The measurement is worked out a little like this

It counts your last 3 months number of posts and then subtracts the number of posts that were commented on. With the remainding number, it calculates what this is as a percentage of your 3 month post rate.

So, in my case - during the last 90 days I made 35 posts of which 16 received less than 3 comments. My blog therefore is currently TR6 (45% of my blog posts received no comments)

The other day I added digg dugg to my list of plugins. Its pretty cool I like it. I was looking at a way of pulling in some related material to tag on to the bottom of my blog posts. I wanted to be able to plugin a keyword and pull posts from somewhere based upon whatever that word was. I looked at the digg duggplugin and thought cool, that might well work.
I couldn’t see a way of adding db variables straight off the bat into the digg dugg function, so after a little bit of fannying around with single.php I came up with this approach. (I may have missed something and wasted the past hour or so doing this, but what the hey, it works, Im happy)

I’m always pleased to see or read initiatives that reduce blogspam, timewasters, me2’s and the like. Akismet is really good, so are captchas and other little things that make it just that little bit more difficult for people to shat on your blog.

Andy has an excellent post on comments and deterring unwelcome commenters. Well, not quite that, its more about getting people to read your comments policy before they comment, but its interesting and damn useful nonetheless. Wordpress specific, but well worth a look.

Good work Andy!

Nofollow and wordpress why I’m removing the rewrite

I was having a read here and there today about nofollow, and was left saying to myself hmmn well at least I don’t employ the damn thing, and if I do its usually with a nudge and a wink poking fun at something or other. I then fired up the firefox search status plugin and switched on the highlight nofollow option and carried on flicking through various tabs and links surprised to see the number of red rel nofollow flags popping up here there and everywhere.

It was kind of ironic to read Andy Beal’s mini diatribe about wikipedia only to see his comments section littered with a whole lot of red dashed boxes! Every single link in every commenters comment, including the link to their sites are nofollowed, even Andy’s own!

If you’ve ever launched a new website, especially since 2005, then you’ll know that it can take quite some time to be found for your target kw’s and phrases within the search engines.This is a little look at Google and how it treats new domains and how trust and authority are bestowed from parent domains to subdomains and how it can be an effective strategy in kick starting a new campaign, without excessive reliance on PPC campaigns.
I launched a new subdomain on the 1st January 2007. It fitted in with one of my new years resolutions of blog regularly.

I wrote a few posts about various odds and sods as and when they occured to me. I gave them logical titles and didn’t give too much thought to any SEO’d page content and structure strategy. It was a Wordpress subdomain in the form of robwatts.wordpress.com.

I love wordpress, its a great product. I used it recently on a free subdomain of theirs and wrote a few posts. I wasn’t sure I was going to get into this blogging lark so thought it was a handy half way house. I didn’t want to go out and get a domain to put it on, upload the scripts and configure it unless I was really sure that I was going to get in to it.

10 days later I’m kinda hooked. I like spouting off and venting about stuff that pisses me off or interests me or just bemuses/amuses me.

So last night I bit the bullet. I exported all the old posts to the new WP setup here and went out and sourced the various plugins and themes I wanted to use.