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There have been some interesting articles this week on the issue of whether blogs should carry paid advertising and sponsored links, this is a debate that has been running for a while ever since Google asked bloggers and webmasters to report any paid links that they saw on other websites or blogs. Obviously they did not realise that this could be a surefire sneaky way to sabotage a competitor’s website if you were both trying to rank highly for the same keywords. Read more »

I got this tip from from Tay at superbloggingtips, it is a simple plugin for your Wordpress blog that does all the search engine optimization (SEO) work for your blog in a couple of simple steps, and will help you make more money blogging. If you do not know much about SEO, no need to worry: the plugin asks you a few simple questions and you include your information in boxes on the ‘options’ page once the plugin is installed. If you are a complete newbie to SEO then you can download this excellent free ebook, SEO Made Easy, that will give you a good understanding of search engine optimization. Maybe you think that SEO sounds a bit geeky? Well there is nothing geeky in getting lots of free traffic from the search engines and Making Money From Your Blog!

The plugin sets up all the key on-page ranking factors. For me the cleverest part is the way it deals with titles. The SEO plugin for Wordpress changes all page or post titles from the Wordpress default style, which is not search engine friendly as it starts with the main blog title. So every page has the same initial title. The plugin puts your post or page title first when seen through a browser bar. This is a handy tool - I spent ages changing the Wordpress code manually to do this, and now I find it is available in a simple plugin. Remember, when you download this plugin: it can seriously improve the money you make from blogging.

BlogCatalog claims to be the leading social directory for bloggers. One aspect that many find quite intrusive is the BlogCatalog widget. If you are registered with BlogCatalog your profile picture appears on the widget as you visit any other members’ sites. We have two memberships at BlogCatalog for our various blogs in different niches. When my partner tried to log in today the ‘log out’ button was not responding and the site stayed locked on to my profile. We then had to find the cookie for this site and clear it so that he could log in. When he did get into the site, he discovered that his site had been declined - after being a member of the site for nearly a year. No explanation given, and he had no email notification from BlogCatalog either.

All in all, not a great experience with this blog bookmarking site. I notice they are offering a week’s trial of the new ‘donor features’ which are in beta testing. These are going to cost$6 a month and they will offer:

	Stand Out! Support the blogcatalog community and your account will be upgraded with a support badge. The support badge will be placed on your profile so you are sure to stand out.	Comments I’m not sure this is worth paying for
	Beta Access Get access to our newest features before they are released to the public.	Test their beta features for them
	No Ads No more pesky ads getting in your way, browse BlogCatalog ad free!	There are no ads on the site
	Get Featured As a premium member your blog will be prominently displayed on our homepage, helping you get the exposure your blog deserves!	Featured status could be useful - but how many sites will be featured?
	Online Community Integration Integrate your online communities to personalize your profile page. Currently we only have Twitter support but stay tuned for Digg, Delicious, last.fm, and many more!	Could be useful - most sites are developing thsi kind of feature
	Weekly Thumbshot Updates Is your blog’s thumbshot not recent enough for you? Support the community and you can update your thumbshot every week.	This would not affect my decision to visit a blog

The number of links to your site will affect your page rank and search engine rankings. But, in the words of Google, “avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links”. How can you be certain that you have not allowed any bad links from your site? It is now much easier to find out with an excellent free link checking tool called the Bad Neighborhood checker.

Thousands of links from overcrowded directory pages in niches unrelated to your site will not benefit your page rank - of course I was aware of that and I am quite careful about the places where I seek backlinks now. The Bad Neighborhood tool will quickly scan the outbound links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and alert you to possible problem areas.

I used this on my own site and there were a few questionable links lurking in my outbound links, which I would not have discovered without using the tool.

You get a lot of useful information from the link checker: link density is highlighted using the red, green amber traffic light system. Green means the site meets Google’s Webmaster guidelines of 100 links or less. Then there is a tick to indicate that the page checks ‘clean’ - i.e. there are no links to adult or other questionable sites. If a link is not ticked then it can show as a ‘redirect’ - not always suspicious as the tinyurls will flag in this way. But you might want to check other redirect links that show up. If the link page no loner exists the ‘404 not found’ cross will show, and finally if the link includes links where the anchor text contains bad language you will see the ‘Bad Neighborhood’ alert.

My suspicious links had arrived on my site because I hosted a few ‘Blog Carnival’ editions. The blog owners who submitted stories to me had some very questionable outbound links from their own sites, to adult and gambling sites. These were ‘nofollow’ links but they would still penalise me so I have now removed the links and I am not hosting any more blogging carnivals.

Another site that had sent me some bad outbound links was wholinkstome.com. Because any website owner can enter their URL on the site and the latest additions are listed together, my URL was next to all sorts of gambling and adult pages.

All this showed me that care is needed when choosing where to exchange links for your website or blog, and the online link exchange sites are out as most member sites are simply spam sites that could get your own site banned if you link to them.