Two Issues: Spam and Non-Reciprocal Links
Spammers
Although it is not obvious on the front page I have been doing some work on this blog in the backend. If you take a look at the Defensio count meter on my blog you will see how unhappy the spammers were with the choices I made.
They particularly detest my new comments policy and I’ll let you figure out which specific provisions pissed them off most of all. Yes, I’m here to tell you that I will never ever go back to using Akismet. Akismet gives far too many false positives and has other problems that I won’t dwell on here.
The good news is that Defensio is working just great for me. It was installed on January 9th so take a look at the spam count and you will have an idea of the volume of spam that has been directed at this blog.
Non-reciprocal Links
Please check my Links page and look for a link to your blog link on it. If you find a link to your blog there and, if you have no reciprocating link to my blog in yours, then within the next 10 days I will either delete the link to your blog or I will attach a “no-follow” tag to it.
good call on the non-reciprocal links, i should check my own links page. (i don’t mind bleeding page rank to people i know in person, but i should be more judicious with the rest)
Actually it sounds logical to me. But I find that there are many blogs which have linked to me but which I don’t read or I may not be interested in the content. So then what does one do? It is not possible for me to give links to blogs I don’t read. What do you think?
@adam
Spring is here and it’s time to make a new beginning. I know some things that I have not been putting to use in this blog but that’s about to change. My complete change is now underway on the one-step-at-a-time plan.
The first step I took was to explore the resource links I had in my blogroll to see if the expected reciprocation was evidenced. It wasn’t and worse still was the fact that I discovered some spam sites among them by checking out the blogs they linked to. Needless to say, I clued in and dumped over 30 links.
The Technorati window is six months and Google is at it with page rank determinations again. This blog has taken a huge nose dive, primarily, because I was so damn depressed and immobilized this winter that I couldn’t write. However, in addition to the blog links I’m carrying here I also have 17 of them registered as Technorti favorites and the reciprocal linkage is not happening so I will be cleaning up that bit too.
Spring is here and it’s time to clean-up and make a new beginning. :-D
@nita
Yikes! I answered you and then I accidentally deleted my response (red-faced). If you take a look at the A blogger’s pages/sites they do not have Blogrolls as long as their arms. They carry very few links and those that they do carry are relevant links to related topic blogs with reciprocating links in place. They track their links and are watchful when it comes to reciprocation.
Spiders from some search engines will stop crawling your page when they reach 100 links. So if your front page has more than 100 links on it (check the whole page, including links in the posts and in the sidebars) then it’s advised from a SEO (search engine optimization) perspective that you should cut them back so they are not a drain on your blog’s page rank.
Every link is a sieve that does nothing for your blog and in fact actually leaks out page rank when there is no reciprocating link in place. Knowing that means that to preserve and protect the page rank that this blog has descended to I have 3 choices:
(1) delete all non-reciprocating links;
(2) retain the url address but break the linkage to it Example: thistimethisspace instead of http://thistimethisspace.com
(3) attach a no follow tag to the link rel=”nofollow”
Resources for maintaining and tracking links.
Comments: When anyone posts a comment to this blog entering a username, email address and blog url then their username will be linked to their blog. I will not break that link unless I determine that it’s being used to direct traffic to a page/blog/site that’s either commercial, covered in advertising an/or spammy or sploggish. The same thing goes for links included in comments boxes.
Brightfeather I understand that but there is another problem. You see I have a lot of links to media sites and other useful sites which I feel a reader might find useful. Those sites are top sites (for example times of india) and they will never link to me. So then what do I do?
I posted a comment but it disappeared. Must have gone into spam I think
Hi Nita,
I found one comment in the spam filter and fished it out. You can attach rel=”nofollow” to the media links you are concerned about. The result will be that the search spiders will ignore it when indexing your site for page rank determination. I’m doing this now on my resources blog because I have 3 pages of resource links that would otherwise suck the page rank right out of it.
Thanks for that advise. In fact after I read this post I have already cleaned up my blogroll quite a bit. Now I shall do this with the media links too. Thanks again!
You’re welcome Nita. :)