Shy Girl Speaks

In sort of an homage to the Turnip of Power's post titled, "Remove Dead Links From Your Site," I've decided to run a little clean-up of my own. In my cleanup efforts, I found a site that gave me a list of links I had posted on my blog that may have hurt my site stats.

The Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker Tool checks all outgoing links on a site to find ones that may be hurting a site's reputation. For example, if I were to link to a spammy website, it would make me look bad to not only Google, but to a handful of other websites and most importantly, to my readers. According to this tool, most of the sites I've linked to are reputable, but there were a few, in particular, that were less than reputable. One of these sites I owed a thanks to so I kept the link to it, but made it a no-follow link. On another one of my blogs, which was a do-follow blog, contained many "bad" links. I've thus made the blog no-follow and I should soon see a positive change in site stats because of this.

So, this brings me to a question for my readers. If you've run your site url through this tool, did you have to make any changes to outgoing links on your blog?

It's of major importance for a blogger to make sure every thing on their blog is in working before even asking for thoughts on their blog. Commenting is one of the most important features of a blog. Commenting alone can make or break a blog, if you have very few comments, readers may think you blog is 'just another blog' whereas if you've got tons of comments, readers may think, 'wow, this blog must be something'. There are many elements of a blog that people forget about. Here are some things to keep in mind:

Is your comment form working properly?
On this blog I've actually had an error in my commenting for months and didn't know about it. I was too busy to realize that no-one was commenting until another blogger told me in a forum that my comment form wasn't working

Do I have to have an account to comment?
If I have to have an account to comment... even a Google account, I probably won't. In Blogger, you can change it so that everyone can comment either with Google accounts, OpenID, Anonymously, or by leaving a site URL and name. Even though many bloggers don't accept anonymous comments, they'd be surprised by the honesty you can get in a comment if you allow this. Also, many people just prefer to remain anonymous. I've probably received more anonymous comments than any others! Take a look at this post for example, look at all the anonymous comments. Imagine if you wrote a post about illegal downloading, if I was a person who downloaded music illegally I would be afraid to say so in a comment if my name or URL is attached to the comment.

Do you delete spam comments or have a captcha form?
When I see a blog that has a ton of spam comments, I automatically think that the author of the blog doesn't care about the blog. A great way to prevent this from happening is to require captcha. Captcha doesn't stop everything, but you'd be surprised what it does stop! Also, if you set your blog software to notify you upon receiving a comment, you can manually read each one as they come in. Another option is to manually approve each comment that comes in, but I tend to steer away from this one.