It was five days now since I start my spring cleaning on my site and what I found out really furious me. Something I though won’t gonna happen to me but well it’s happen and give me a whole idea what is life out there in the blogosphere. What is it? let me start it this way, when I starting blogging all that I’m doing is to promote my site and build my credibility towards my fellow bloggers and making friends with them as a community. So what I did was I joined a lot of Bloggers Social Networks Site and one thing I learned from them is to exchange links, “you link me I link you” type of agreement. In a month I started to build my credibility, known a lot of people, meet a lot friend and got a lot of lovelinks. And as time goes by, the friendship grows some stay and some is gone just like that without trace of your link from their weblog, pretty I can say against on what they promise, so this is my question to them are they a legal Weblog, a link farms or just a link whore? I can only say now: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

Ok, enough for whining Let’s go back to my spring cleaning. The whole idea of my spring cleaning is to find out all the dirt inside my site and to correct everything for the reason why Google Page Rank spanked me so hard with their last update just a month ago. So I need to start cleaning by deleting all unnecessary links and sweeping dirty links around my site, get rid all those link whore. And make a new and fresh, well maintained site.

To start with, I only use three type of tools to do it:

First tool, I read a Free SEO book by Brad Callen (recommended for beginners) and SEO checklist from iwebtool.com where I found a lot of stuff how to optimize my weblog and the best of all is to know the reason why Google spanked me so hard and leave me nothing on my PR bar. For the record, I’m not a SEO expert, I only read the book twice and apply what I though was right and the best way to clean my site and a possible way to gain my previous Page Rank back again or maybe higher. lol. I can say that I should read a lot of this book first, since the start of my blog site.

Second tool, I paid a subscription for iwebtool.com, it’s a best website with a lot of tools available to optimize your site and to learn more about niche site. Just for $4.95 Gold Account you will get the most product they offer like – 10 Directory Listing, Unlimited Tool Queries, SEO Checklist, Brand-FREE Tools, 10,000 AdsFlip Credits per month. Pagerank prediction really brighten up my day, before the cleaning of my site my PR prediction I generate this tool and the result is nothing but a big zero and after I take out all the mess in my site my PR prediction now is PR4, really this tool is working man. But the tools I like most and use for my spring cleaning is the backlink checker, where I was able to check all those blogger who promise exchange links to me from social networks. But this is the sad part, 40% of all those fellow blogger who promise me a reciprocal link delete my site from their blogroll and nowhere to be found on their website. What happens is a one way link, which is a real pain in my Page Rank as I found out in the SEO book. Analyze the image below so you will get the whole idea.

But this one is the nemesis of my Page Rank, a sping, trackback spammer and link farms (please help me if I miss something). This words really foreign to me since English is my second language.lol. Ignorance is a curse for blogger like me or because I’m just too lazy knowing more about spammer. I can say this evil doers really suck out all the juices of my site, because of my ignorance. I just though that trackback build my PR for having a lot of inbound links, not knowing anything about link farm and trackback spam. So even Akismet already label it as a spammer I still approved it and my doubt was already there, stupid me I let them go. Their tactics is they will trackback to your post, so you will check it and you will see the site is legally existing but all the post their was all from other weblog too. Most of my paid post where they usually lurking so I was thinking that it was part of the advertisers way of optimizing my post in favor of them (I think so but in not so good ways, they usually last for a month), so I just let them stay and my trust to them already been set in. I never been bother anymore to check them out. So what happen during my spring cleaning, link cleaning task, while I’m checking back again all my comments, trackback, backlinks and everything, I found out that all those previously existing trackback post is nothing but a non-existing site now, also known as a broken link and the worst of all the worst thing happen to my site is my link to Google banned site (good thing Google don’t ban my site) where a legal looking post and site before will redirect (301 redirect) the user to another site and if you click the link it will redirect you to a virus infected site. The look of a front page looks ok, but once you mistakenly click or try to pan around the site wherever on the front page it will automatically download a tons of data file inside of your computers because the whole front page was a clickable image like a mask disguising as a front page complete with header, sidebar, post, nav links, etc.. To my anger and worried that will infect my computers I immediately delete the links and close my browser and leave me no evidence of this malicious site, so that I can share the URL of the site and make everyone aware on the modus operation on this hacker. So to spread this information and awareness I was hoping that if some of my site readers had encounter this site, first I’m sorry about the harm they cause you if any, and please if you got a chance to list down the URL of this site please share it here by comments. And if in any chance that this malicious spammer got a chance to spam your site and you make a list of the domain name and the IP address, please share it to others. I was hoping that most of the noobz bloggers will be aware of this propaganda use by this spammer.

Third tool and my first line of defense, install all the best, all kind of anti-spam plugin available for WordPress. And here is the list of plugin I’am using right now to fight back against all those unscrupulous spammer. If you know much better anti-spam plugin that is not listed below please share it by comments.

-I also join to all WordPress blogs that are protected by the best anti-spam triangle of comment spam defenders: Bad Behavior, Spam Karma 2 and Akismet.

-Math Comment Spam Plugin: Basically it asks a very simple maths question which readers have to answer before they can leave a comment i.e. prove they are human and not a robot. The questions really are simple, and avoid using annoying Captchas.

-Simple Trackback Validation Plugin: This will hopefully cut down on trackback spam by not allowing a trackback to be placed unless it has a link back to my site. If it doesn’t then it’ll get dumped in the moderation queue

-CryptX: No more SPAM by spiders scanning you site for email adresses. With CryptX you can hide all your email adresses, with and without a mailto-link, by converting them using javascript or UNICODE. Although you can choose to add a mailto-link to all unlinked email adresses with only one click at the settings.

-Ozh’ Auto Moderate Comments: When a post gets old, instead of simply closing the discussion, send comments and trackbacks to the moderation queue. This will greatly reduce spam.

-WARP WordPress Admin Reminder Plugin: This plugin adds a reminder tip (in large red letters) in the top right corner of your WordPress admin pages. The text is a link to the appropriate page in the wp-admin area. Reminders include: * Making a backup of your database (every Friday) * Checking your spam for false positives (every Wednesday) * Other tasks that are easy to forget (every third Monday)

-Nofollow Reciprocity: Most big sites by default use ‘nofollow’ tags therefore not trusting external links or users that post those links there. This means that they don’t give any credit (in the form of PageRank) to those links and are essentially considering them spam (as that was ‘officially’ the purpose of ‘nofollow’ tag introduction – actually messing with the blogging community search engine rankings was the real purpose). This results in their pages appearing higher in search engine results and your pages appearing lower.

This plugin detects links to above mentioned sites, and puts ‘nofollow’ tags on them. ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’ WordPress is a major blogging platform, with tens of millions of users. If many people using WordPress use this plugin, other big sites may reconsider their ‘nofollow’ strategy. This plugin expands on Wikipedia nofollow plugin hacked by a revolted blogger.

And to all Bloggers who stay with me up to now, much love to you guys.

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