Flukeit

As you may or may not know, I run a blog directory and receive thousands of requests for addition to the directory. I have some rules, and one of them is that it has to be an actual blog.

It amazes me how many people register a quick blogspot url, copy and paste a couple of articles, plaster it with tons of ads and call it a blog.

While dictionary.com describes a weblog as

(wÄ›b’lôg’, -lŏg’) n. A website that displays in chronological order the postings by one or more individuals and usually has links to comments on specific postings.

I think it should be taken a little bit further. Sure sites are technically blogs, but I like Dictionary.com’s other definition better.

Splog:

Definition: a fake web blog containing links to sites affiliated with the blogger, set up to boost the search engine rankings and ad impressions for those sitesExample: The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank.

Definition: a web blog created solely to spread spam; spam links added to the comments section of a blogExample: Report splog to help protect and clean up the blogosphere one splog at a time.

Quite often, I find myself reading the Links for Sale forums in DigitalPoint for a good deal and to keep up on market link pricing. Lately, I’ve been noticing more and more blog owners selling blog posts. These range from $5 to $25, and the shocking part of it is you write the post yourself.

Please don’t get me wrong, I have written reviews for websites and software for hire, but I always write them myself. It just doesn’t seem right to do otherwise.

For a webmaster, two things rule – Money and content. In this case, the blog owner is getting both with no work on his/her own.

As I’ve posted in the past, I maintain a couple of different directories. Some are more popular than others, just as some are more strict about the quality/type of sites that are submitted. I can expect several dozen website submissions a day, and if I let a few days go by without maintenance, it can easily get out of control.

That is exactly what happened, and before long there were over 4000 links waiting to be accepted into this directory. I have been putting in a lot of time on it, and now I’m gaining on them. The list of pending sites is down around 3000. I have to work on them every day to keep narrowing the list down.

I have decided that I will be even more selective with the sites I permit. Some of the things that I have decided on, and have implemented are:
1. Site titles that are just keywords, will not be accepted.
2. Titles/descriptions all in caps will not be accepted.
3. I’ve become very picky with sites related to health care, as these generally turn quickly to MFA sites.
4. I’ve been working to market the featured links more. Now that most of the categories have a decent PR, is is not reasonable to shell out a few bucks for a good PR link. A featured link keeps you on the front page and gets you approved normally within 24 hours.

I will keep working hard on this, and I’ve decided I’m not going to stress out about catching up. It’s a free directory and provides a great service to those wishing to improve their website popularity. People shouldn’t expect a free directory to maintain high quality standards, and ultra-quick approval at the same time. Right?

For well over a year I’ve been interested in a mod for PHPLD 3.0+ that will update the page rank values for all the links. I’ve looked into it in the past, and couldn’t find anything I didn’t have to pay for. My search ended today as I was reading a post on Alive Blog about sorting a directory by order of page rank, and it mentioned the phpLD PR Update Tool. I followed the link and came to the Jago Harry Blog (Another quality Wordpress theme by Brian Gardner by the way!)

Anyway, I downloaded this Mod, took ten minutes to go through the install and whoala! A new quick, easy, and best of all, FREE PR update mod for my directories!

During the last several weeks, I’ve been experiencing problems with Bradsblog. Sometimes, the site simply won’t resolve and the sands in the hourglass flow forever. Other times, I can get on but cannot access the back end to perform administrative functions. After a few back and forths with Dreamhost support, and realized that the problem lies in the Akismet anti comment spam plugin. In order to resolve these issues, I had to edit the Akismet.php file by removing the following code from it.

$n = mt_rand(1, 5);

if ( $n % 5 )

$wpdb->query(”OPTIMIZE TABLE $wpdb->comments”);

Dreamhost will continue to monitor this and see if this fixes the problem.