SEO

Optimize Brian’s Threaded Comments for SEO

July 16, 2008 By: Justin | 8 Comments

I’m a big fan of Brian’s threaded comments and so are several other bloggers. The plugin is designed to allow you to directly respond in a thread to specific people who leave a comment. Its a great way for you and your visitors to interact in your comments. This increases comments, which is great for SEO… but I have a problem with this plugin. It inserts a MASSIVE amount of JS and CSS directly into every single page of your blog. This fills your page with junk, increases file size, and increases loading speed. I like to keep as much JS and CSS in external files as possible.

I suggest cleaning this up and I’m surprised that nobody does this. If you don’t know how to clean this up by hand, I made it really simple for you.

Cleaning up Brian’s Threaded Comments

(If you have no experience modifying files, back stuff up first)

Step 1
Save this text into a .js file. This is an external javascript file. If you have never done this, open up notepad, put in the text, save as, name what ever you want and add the .js. Or you can simply download my comments.js Upload this to your server. Note the URL to the location of the file.

Step 2
Open the CSS for your theme and insert this code. You will need to modify it where I have commented. Insert your address into the CSS. Replace the url.com with yourdomain.com.

Now paste it into your stylesheet. If you do not know how to do this, go to your dashboard, then design, then theme editor, then Stylesheet (at bottom), scroll to bottom of style sheet, paste code, save.

Step 3
Download this modified plugin. Open it up in your php editor or in notepad.
On line 151, you should see this code:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://url.com/js/comment.js”></script>
It is about 2/3 through the code.
Change the URL to the URL from step 1! Replace http://url.com/js/comment.js with the URL of your js file.

Step 4
Save and upload the new modified plugin. Write over the old one. If you have wp-cache turned on, clear your cache. All your pages should now be much cleaner.

What Changes Were Made

The plugin use to contain the CSS and JS required to run the comments. We simply placed the CSS and JS into external files. Then I took the plugin and removed the hardcoded CSS and JS. The plugin now only prints out the link / call to the external javascript file. Google does not have to make its way through a wall of code before it finds your content.

Filed Under SEO, Wordpress

Referer – Spam, Spoofing, and Marketing

July 15, 2008 By: Justin | 10 Comments

When a Internet browser moves from one page to another an HTTP referer is passed to transfer information about the source page. This information is sent to the server via HTTP headers.

Simple Example

When you come to my homepage your browser carries over information from whatever page you were looking at previously. My server can tell if you came from Google, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, or from a link in a blog post. This is how analytics software is able to track your visitors.

Analytics

Lets pretend you search Nashville SEO and click the link to my site. When you search for Nashville SEO, you will see this address.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Nashville+SEO

That is the URL for page one for Nashville SEO. When you click my site’s link, your browser will pass to my site that you came from the page “http://www.google.com/search?q=Nashville+SEO”

This information is captured by the server (and any analytic software). From this link, your analytics software can determine two things. Visitor is from Google. Visitor came via the search term “Nashville SEO”

That’s the basics of how referers work and how they are used for common tasks like analytics.

Spamming

Have you ever checked your analytics and found referral traffic from a page, but when you check it out there is no link? Well, they just referral spammed your site.

It is possible to manipulate and fake your HTTP headers and insert various information. This can be used to insert false information. When you move from one page to another, you can block the real header from being transferred and send one of your choice. So you can browse the Internet and every site interprets the visit as referral traffic from the URL of your choice.

Why Do People Referer Spam?

There are two major reasons to spam your referer.

First, many sites use to publish their analytics (and some still do). These would be a browsable print out of analytic information which could be crawled by search engines. Naturally it become an option for back links. By by faking your referer, you could show up on their referral tables and get a free back link! A lot of people stopped having public stats, but some sites still publish them.

The second reason is manipulation of the newbie blogger / webmaster. When you first learn about tracking your visitors, you’ll catch yourself checking your stats constantly to see where people are coming from and who is linking to you. Many times you’ll click through and visit the site. If a marketer has a product or site that appeals to webmasters in a certain demographic, they insert the URL of the site they want to promote and simply browse sites of people they want to promote to. When the newbie checks their stats, they’ll follow the referral through. The spammer successfully got them to visit their site. This can be automated to spam 1,000’s of sites, which results in 100’s of visitors.

How Do You Spam Your Referers?

The are multiple ways to do this, but here is a really easy one. Refcontrol is a simple Firefox Add On. You can insert a global URL to fake (used on all sites) or you can set specific referrals for specific sites. It’s very easy to use.

Spoofing

This isn’t really SEO related, but while we’re talking about referers, lets discuss spoofing. When you are faking your referer, you are referer spoofing. So referer spam is referer spoofing, but for use to market and promote your site. You can spoof for other reasons too. The other common use of referer spoofing is to by pass website security. Some low quality security setups work by checking the referer of the browser. A person must by pass the security system to get into the private or members area, but the only internal security is to check that they came to each page from another page inside the member area. By placing a URL that is inside into refcontrol, and then pointing your browser at the member area, you are able to bypass the security check because it thinks you were already inside (since you have the referer). This method is used heavily by those who break into porn sites. Its a really simple method of breaking into adult sites.

Conclusion

I wrote this to help explain a question in a forum I’m a member of. A lot of new webmasters are left scratching their head when they see a referral site without a link. I hope this explains things. This information can be used for some pretty nasty grayhat / blackhat type marketing. You can use it in the ways I mentioned, but can also be used to manipulate traffic trading scripts that use headers to track incoming traffic. If you get creative, you can do some fun stuff. I don’t suggest doing any of this, because a lot of it is either unethical, blackhat, or in the case of hacking a site, potentially illegal.

Filed Under Sneaky

Dateless Sniper BANS Template

July 13, 2008 By: Justin | 9 Comments

Another Free BANS Template from SEO Zombie. This time with a little twist. Over at Court’s Internet Marketing blog, he has blogged about a concept called keyword sniping. For the process, he has developed a few Wordpress themes. The most recent was the Dateless Sniper 2.0 theme.

I’ve taken this Wordpress theme and modified it for BANS. Now you can have a BANS site that looks just like Court’s keyword sniping site. This has a few advantages. First, the theme has decent SEO. Second, the theme doesn’t look like a traditional BANS sites. Which is great, because Google has been slapping thin looking BAN sites This template helps make BANS look more legit. Lastly, the theme integrates well with a blog running Court’s Dateless Sniper theme. You can install a blog and store on the same domain and use the blog to help index your store pages by filling the domain with unique textual content.

So check out this theme.

Dateless Sniper BANS Template

Dateless Sniper BANS Template

Download Sniper BANS Template

New template, so let me know if you have any bugs. This is a free BANS template, all I ask is that you keep the link back to my blog that appears in the footer. Credit to Court for the original theme. Tried to give him some extra link love here.

I would suggest using the theme to cloak your BANS site. Integrate it well with a Wordpress blog using Court’s theme. The blog can be used to gain trust from Google, since the biggest flaw of BANS is the thin content. I have a couple ideas in mind about ways to trick Google into trusting .info BANS. Google seems to trust .info blogs more than BANS, so make it appear less “BANS like”. Not sure how well this will work, but I’m going to test it.

Hope you enjoy the new BANS template.

Filed Under BANS

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