Agreed: “An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. It works invisibly without CAPTCHA’s, or other inconvenience to site visitors. The plugin includes spam-free contact form feature as well. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog!”

In particular, I give wp-spamfree the thumbs up because as soon as it is installed, I was botfree and spamfree. Go download them now.

It is one thing to have good traffic, it is quite another when these traffic are just bots or robots that seems to find their way into your comment posts and drop in links that are repetitive and annoyingly irrelevant. These spammers, as they are called, will take a lot of your time and energy off productive work online.

p.s. I did try using comment policy but it did not keep the bots or robots from creeping in on the comment posts. It turns out not effective in keeping those spammers at bay.

A recent comment on my last post on  Comment Policy Plugin For Wordpress was written in Russian: По-моему, у Вас украли эту статью и поместили на другом сайте. Я её уже видела. Since I do not read Russian, I have to translate it and it actually says, “I think you stole this article and placed on another site. I had already seen.”

I certainly do not need to clarify why I posted the article as this is my homepage. Yet, comments like these bug me because it makes me wonder if readers can ’smell’ if posts have been plagarised, stolen or re-edited? I am feeling quite glad actually that you have made that comment. Otherwise I would not have been able to update this site this week for many reasons; I’ve not been online browsing for a few days. Now I have.

Here is a screenshot from subscribing to Gobala Krishnan’s website since 2008, click to see the bigger picture:

Topics on sales and marketing excite me less than website building tools. You can tell that I have only read two letters that do not have anything to do with sales and purchases.

Here’s the letter I received regarding his comment policy for wordpress:

Wordpress plugins are great to work with as long as you understand their uses and how to set them right. There are enough make money online blogs and sharing another one online just does not cut out for me. This letter however, is more of a teaching tool, no coupons attached.  If you have read the post correctly, credit to the creator of this plugin is given at the end of the post.

How do you know if a post has been plagarised, copied and re-edited? In other words, how is this not stolen?

1. You give credit (link) to the source of the article.
2. You do not give the reader option to download the plugin , software or script from your own website. (very importantly not to try this without prior permission to redistribute from your local domain.)
3. You use the explanation given by the source site and then always make reference back the source file in a hyperlink.

It is easy for me to understand this because every now and then, my own original post are linked word for word without any literature whatsoever to mention that it has come from my website,  except for two words “read more…..” Naughty naughty. That is pure cut and paste, lazy way of giving credit to the blogger who wrote.

Some people look for the about page to read about the author’s profile. I have not created my about page yet because I simply want to use this blog to focus on my journey online and not on myself. Maria Montessori is the only page I have got so far and that is because of my Montessori training background. You can read “How This Domain Is Inspired?”

Linking back to the source url is very important if you have indeed written something about or from another url. It shows your networking presence online and certainly open doors for readers who are interested in the topic to go right to the source with one click.

If you notice, headline news websites are great culprits for posting news word for word from the source without linking back to the source. Just type in Michael Jackson’s news and you can see for yourself. Read at least 5 news on the latest and you can certainly find the same form of writing and layout.

Yet another trick bloggers used to cut and past original text without linking back to the source url is by writing only the first 160 characters in his own words because in search engine optimisation (SEO) practice, only the first 160 and last few of the post will be crawled or spidered completely when a reader enter his keywords. I have read many myself and their google page rank is so high, you won’t believe it until you study the rest of the post.

Another more concrete way to determine if the blogger is genuine, you can look for this banner on his blog:

You can grab a banner for your website here Copyscape If you decide to use the banner, just make sure you follow some the rules of ‘white hat blogging’ code of conduct.

Having said that, the banner will be posted on this site from now onwards if that makes you happy.

Whilst it is good to receive regular comments, it is even better if the readers come forward to show themselves using real names and engaging comments. Yet, ‘legitimate comments’ can be stuffed with keywords in the Name column for their website (some smart SEO guru told them that’s how it’s done). Others may drop their signature link (s) in the comment itself. This makes it difficult for you to moderate, and previously you just had to live with it.

So Gobala Krishnan has come up with a neat wordpress plugin that allows you to display your comment policy that helps your readers self-moderate their own comments.

This is a great tool. And if you have a wordpress blog, you would know that AKISMET just will not work anymore in terms of capturing SPAM messages. There are people out there who have learned the trick of the “backlink” trade. Nowadays, the disguise is so cleverly written, you don’t even think you need to delete that comment until you discover the names are different, the emails stay the same but the url has not changed.

Recently, I sent an email to a reader whose comment I have approved. It was a ‘gmail’ account; google sent back a message saying suspended. Whoa!

You can read about how to activate and set the comment policy plugin or download at wordpress.og.

As you can see, it provides options for you to choose which pages should include these adsense ads. No more running back and forth from your glossary of adsense codes to your sites to get these ads up. Go to developers of this plugin, thaludasina to download now. The best thing is, it is all free.