WordPress Spam - No Solution :(

Further to my last post the spam continues. It seems to only come in once a day, at this point, but certainly a huge amount of links and writes to the blog itself. It starts with:

"u style="display none" News......

Anoyone know about this?

I certainly do get the benefit for them - does hurt us doesn't it.

I am running out of ideas - Comments are very welcomed.

Jan

Update on WordPress Spam Solution

I am almost concerned to post what we have done here in case spammers read it. So I am going to add the last thing we have done. 24 hours later there has been no spam in the header or footer - but - it's not enough time to consider ourselves out of the woods yet but this last installation of a plug-in seems to be helping.

It's called WP Ban: http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

Ban users by IP, IP Range, host name, user agent and referrer url from visiting your WordPress’s blog. It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name, user agent or referrer url tries to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned. There will be statistics recorded on how many times they attempt to visit your blog. It allows wildcard matching too. By Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan.

Best way to get info on potential IP's to ban is to check your server log files and then type a few of the suspicious ones into your fav search engine then check the results. When we did this we found forums and blogs with ready to copy ban lists. We also went to Spamhaus and got a list of the top spam host addresses.

If anyone else has info please do pass it on for all of us.

Jan

You Just Never Know What Is Going On Under The Hood

So many of us are blogging now and so many of us don't really know what is going on 'under the hood'. Let me explain.

I have a WordPress blog. As most people do I moderated comments because there was so much spam. Even if I went in every other day to clean these out there would still be hundreds next time I went in. I have finally had to turn the comment function off. Sad state of affairs I must say.

Anyways, yesterday I went to my blog to check for some audio coding to send along to a client as an example and what I found was very unsettling. When I did View Source I saw lines and lines of linked spam (see picture below).



In my search to find out where this was coming from I found that these had been written to the Headers and Footers in WordPress. Yep - true.

So the next step is to turn off the write function on the header and footer folders. We will see what happens (I will report back).

So for you bloggers out there, it may be very worthwhile to check out what is under your hood.

Jan

Update On Alexa Rank Change

"Alexa captures some activity, of some users, some of the time. Its results are therefore inherently flawed."

There is no doubt that folks see Alexa as a ranking system. I did, certainly not now.

Proper stats are a much better measurement of what is going on. The only problem with 'stats' is that we are the only ones that see them so the 'visitor ranking' only shows to us and not our visitors. So Alexa may not be correct but I am sure many think what they show to be fact.

Read more on this topic at my fav forum:

http://www.webproworld.com/search-engine-optimization-forum/68568-omg-what-happened-my-alexa-ranking.html

What Happened To My Alexa Ranking??

Have you checked your Alexa ranking lately? You may want to take a deep breath before you do!

I was making changes on my site tonight. While doing this I checked my site online for content and saw that my Alexa ranking tripled from the last time I opened the site - which was today. I was absolutely shocked, to say the least.

So I clicked on the Alexa toolbar INFO button and it says their ranking has changed.

Here is a 'brief' of what they say:
~~~~~~~~~~~


(heading) My site's ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?

Your ranking wasn't wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users' interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites' rankings were unaffected by such differences, we've worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.

The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But gezzzzzzzzzz a drop of over 1 million in less than a day! There is no way to see what was there before, and why. From what I can see from their description you cannot even determine what they mean by "broader population".

I do have some feelers out to try and find out if anyone knows what is going on and once I hear something I will post it here.

Jan

Want To Know How Top ClickBank Sellers Do It?

Anyone who is in our business, or an online marketer, will almost surely have seen screenshots of huge ClickBank checks posted on forums and splashed on sales pages.

It's no secret that the top ClickBank earners are making the big money by using the already existing base of ClickBank affiliates, the only question is... how can you do it too?!

Want to know how top ClickBank sellers get those huge checks? They use the massive base of ClickBank affiliates, over 100,000, to flood their websites with a never ending stream of cash-in-hand visitors.

I've discussed the value of using affiliates here before, both on this blog and on my site. Affiliates are a critical component of successfully marketing your product on the Internet. Many affiliate programs, offered through carts like '1 Shopping Cart' or dedicated programs such as 'Commission Junction' (CJ) provide you with tools and access to recruiting affiliates and directly interacting with them.

However, ClickBank does not give easy access to their army of affiliates, but recently, I found a product called ClickBank Stampede that appears to have solved this. It is revealing backdoors and loopholes that will let you tap into this massive base of sellers who are waiting to sell for you.

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/stampede/

This is the fastest, easiest and most effective method I’ve seen for getting tons of visitors to your ClickBank sales page. Even if you don’t sell anything on ClickBank, you should still check it out.

Jan

The God(s) Do Have A Sense Of Humour!

Anyone who is an entrepreneur knows that there are good times and bad times in business. The good times / bad times can cover anything from technical issues to sales and everything in-between. Running your own business is a challenge. Spring brings its own challenges. New projects, new clients and new concerns - good 'ole tax time. The ebb and flow.

This story is about the ability to laugh at adversity.

In our household we have one cat, 11 fish and two birds (who have nested in a fake plant on our porch :) With spring, the 11 fish and two birds are doing the 'spring dance'. Our cat has spring fever and is an indoor cat (say no more :). All of us are feeling the changes and stress of the new season.

Tonight, my "sweet" cat (hahahahaha) was again howling as is her new 'spring' song and I decided that it was time to get the water gun out. Ok, my cat is 11 years old and long past the water gun stage, but the 'spring' howling has been going on all hours of the day and night. So, I get the water gun out, filled it up with water, pointed it at my HOWLINGGGGGGGG cat in hopes she would stop (from the memory of the water gun) but no such luck. So I pull the trigger and spray... water all over me :))))))) . I had the water spray direction pointed at me, not her...too funny. Should have seen her face and heard me laugh!! Wish I had a video to show you!

So what does this have to do with being and entrepreneur and business? Sometimes how you want or expect things to go don't. How you handle the 'direction' it goes can be very good for the soul.

Happy Spring!!

Jan