Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

For SEO reasons you may not want to add your blog roll to every page on your website, but sadly it’s not so easy to do on WordPress. Having  the blog roll links on every page, can really zap your link juice, and overall such site wide links generally don’t help the sites you are linking to.

 Here is a quick quide on how to list your blogroll links on your homepage. It involves editing one of your templates (Admin Menu > Appearance > Editor) and editing some wordpress code around where the Blogroll links are called. On the default Wordpress Theme (and probably your theme also) it can be found in the sidebar.php file. 

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>

Before you start to try and edit the template you need to make sure that you have uploaded the file so it can be edited. 

Replace the code above with the following code:
<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); } ?>

The is_home() function is an inbuilt wordpress function that checks if the page you are on is the home page, and if so it will display the subsequent code. 

Note if you are using “widgets” (Admin Menu > Appearance > Widgets) to populate  your sidebar, then this method might not work.

Some more advanced examples of listing blogroll links

<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks(); } else { wp_list_bookmarks('category=4'); } ?>

This example will show all bookmarks on the home page, and on all other pages it will show just links that are in the 4th category. You can find out the link category number by going to (Admin Menu > Links > Link Categories), then click on the category you want to be displayed. You will now see a URL in your browser that ends in &cat_ID=XX, where XX is the category number. In our example we will display category 4 on all other pages.

It seems that all my comments on blogs in the past few days are getting labelled as SPAM. I started to wonder after a few days when my comments weren’t showing on blogs that normally welcome my comments. I checked with a few friends and checked on some of my other blogs, just to confirm this. It appears that my name / email address / URL / IP address combination are somehow triggering these filters. It came as a shock, as I don’t really bombard blogs with comments, I guess that for every 50 or 60 blog posts I read, I leave 1 comment.

Getting off the Akismet Blacklist

After reading around, a little the only solution I’ve come up with is to contact Akismet and fill out a support question. And wait until you hear back from them.

So for now I will be taking it easy commenting on blogs. I’ve tried to change the name, leave the email address and IP address and omit the URL, and it still thinks I’m a spammer.

Knowing when you are blocked by Akismet

I would be really nice if there was a way to find out if your name / email address / URL / IP address were indeed flagged as SPAM, but maybe this would counteract the good work that Akismet does. Actually, thinking a bit more, there might be one way, if your comment is held in moderation by wordpress, and it’s supported by your theme, it will display a notice, saying that you need to wait for your comment to be approved, that it’s awaiting moderation. Some themes even display your message to only you (using session variables). And when it’s flagged as SPAM you don’t see any difference on the blog post once you’ve added your comment.

Let’s see when I can get back to commenting on other people’s blogs …