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Wordpress tag links and tag clouds. To use or not to use. The debate continues. Most SEO guys are of the opinion that the probability of being penalized by Google increases when wordpress tag clouds are added to a blog/site.

Here’s what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say about the use of tags and tag clouds.

Personally I need my tags as I don’t have time to set keywords for each and every blog post so I rely on All In One SEO to turn my tags into keywords.

In other to keep the Big G happy, I decided to look for a way of adding the nofollow attribute to ALL my tag links including those within a cloud and I stumbled on Kaf Oseo’s Nofollow Tag Cloud.

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Whether we all agree or not, Akismet till dates remains the best anti-spam plug-in for Wordpress blogs. If you’re in doubt all you have to do is deactivate Akismet and try any other anti-spam plug-in on it’s own and you’d note a surge in spam like never before.

Most Captcha plug-ins fail when used in combination with WordPress cache plug-ins such as W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache and they can’t be trusted to work on their own either.

One of Akismet’s UGLIEST features is its white/blank page of horror which it throws up whenever it feels a comment is spammy is nature. This white/blank page of horror can be quite frustrating for commenters who have left lengthy comments as those comments are in most cases lost once the blank page surfaces.

Depending on how the blog author has configured Akismet, comments that trigger the blank page are either deleted entirely from the blog’s system or are stored in the spam folder for moderation. If the blog author is a busy person or just has an aversion for checking his spam folder, you can kiss any of your legit comments which lands in the spam folder, goodbye.

I implore all wordpress blog owners to PLEASE READ: Red Alert! Akismet Might Be Deleting Your Comments ASAP!

Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress comes to the rescue of legit comments taking advantage of Akismet’s blank page of horror and making it useful to both the blogger and his commenters .

Here’s how it works and how it can help you save those legit comments and reduce those spammy comments to the barest minimum .

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In one of my weekly top blog posts round up, I raved about the stunning Smart Sharing plug-in by the folks @ WpBeginner. This plug-in made it possible to add a floating social media bookmark panel to the side of your wordpress blog’s theme making it easier for your readers to bookmark and share your posts.

I was in love with it, until, I casually navigated the mobile version of this site and discovered that the floating panel was now floating over my content thus making it impossible for mobile visitors to read my blog posts.

I uninstalled the plug-in @ once and started looking for ways to implement it’s function within the desktop theme of my blog ONLY! After reading How To Create A Sexy Vertical Sliding Panel Using jQuery And CSS3 and Fixed Social Icons on the Side of Whole Site, I created my own floating bookmarks box and here’s how I managed it.

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The XML Sitemap plug-in for wordpress blogs helps you create a valid xml sitemap with which you can ping Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask each time you update your wordpress blog. Better still, it facilitates the crawling of your pages by the search engines .

For over a year now,  I’ve never been able to ping Yahoo because I didn’t understand how to go about filling the registration/request form for a Yahoo Application ID but Tia Peterson of Complete Guide to Blogging encouraged me to try it again and I did and succeeded .

Here’s how I managed to get a Yahoo application id for the sitemap plug-in.

Log-in into your wordpress admin area and go straight to the XML Sitemap settings page.

Scroll down to the Update Notification area, tick Notify YAHOO about updates of your Blog and then request for an application ID.

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We all know that the best blogging platform existent @ the moment is Wordpress. It makes designing/optimizing a blog/site easy-breezy majorly due to it’s use of plug-ins unlike it’s fierce competitor, Blogger.

Most newbies to blogging with wordpress, do miss out when it comes to what they can achieve in little time, with the right wordpress plug-ins thus my compiling this list of top 15 wordpress plug-ins EVERY wordpress blog must have.

Thanks for Jason Acidre for serving as a catalyst in getting this post ready within a short time .

Without much preambles, let’s begin.

NOTE: For certain wordpress plug-ins to function without a hitch, all themes must have the tag <?php wp_head(); ?> in header.php before </head>.

Also the tag <?php wp_footer(); ?> must be present in footer.php before </body>. Please take note.

SECURING YOUR WORDPRESS INSTALLATION FROM HACKERS AND DATA LOSS

1. Limit Log-in Attempts: This plug-in when configured properly alerts you of any failed attempt to log into your admin area. While alerting you, it also prevents any further log-in attempts from that IP for a number of minutes which you can set as you please.

2. Secure Wordpress: Helps hide your wordpress version from hackers, prevents directory listing of your themes and plug-ins folders, deactivates tooltip and error message at login of WordPress and a lot more.

3. WP-DBManager, WordPress Database Backup and WP-Optimize: there will be times when you’ll probably need to restore your site for many reasons, hacking being one of them. A database backup saves you a lot of work and that’s basically what the first two plug-ins do. They help create a backup of your database. Wp-Optimize helps to keep your database fast, compacted and free of useless files. Check out my article @ QuickOnlineTip on How To Backup and Restore WordPress Database.

You might also want to check out these past posts on securing wordpress: How To Secure Wordpress Blogs Via Htaccess File and How To Secure Wordpress Blogs With Plug-ins.

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Joining the dofollow movement could backfire if you choose the wrong plug-in to get the job done.  You could end up with tons of spammy comments or angry commenters who are wondering why some of their links have suddenly gone nofollow again.

Here are my top dofollow plug-ins for avoiding spammy comments, trackbacks and dofollow links gone AWOL.

Jennifer Ray’s Link Love WordPress Plug-in

Link Love WordPress Plug-in: This is the plug-in I’m presently using. What I love about this plug-in is that it dofollows comment author links based on the author’s email address so that no matter what URL or anchor text the author uses, he/she gets his/her dofollow backlink

It’s simple to configure and you can set how many comments the author must have in other to be dofollowed and you can also blacklist email addresses of past commenters that have suddenly started spamming your blog

NOTE: To avoid getting penalized by Google, I advise you to visit every link posted on your blog to make sure it ain’t spammy or fishy in nature.

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Ever left a comment on a wordpress blog only for a blank page to appear when you did this? Well it could be a problem with the site’s owner comments.php or it could just be dear ol’ Akismet sending your comment to the spam folder or even worse DELETING YOUR COMMENT!

This has created quite a chaos online that I decided to shut down Akismet for a week and allow WP Spam Free to run alone but after 4 days, I had to reactivate Akismet because spam comments that generally never crossed Akismet, started to stream in.

Generally when you install Akismet, it comes pre-configured to automatically delete all spam comments on posts older than 1 month.

What I make of this is that, if a commentator leaves a comment on a blog post older than 30 days and Akismet mistakenly sees it as being spammy, this comment would be deleted @ once without passing through the spam folder for moderation .

Here’s how to STOP Akismet from probably deleting spam comments on your blog

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Almost a month ago, I showed you guys a Step by Step Guide on How To Setup W3 Total Cache. W3 Total Cache 0.9 has been released and is a lot easier to configure. You don’t even have to hack into your .htaccess to enable stuff like browser caching anymore.

With some complaints about the last tutorial being heavy on images, I’ve decided to keep this based on text only.

Let’s begin

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UPDATE: W3 Total Cache 0.9 has been released and it’s got a different interface. Do please check out Making Blogs Faster With W3 Total Cache 0.9 when you’re through reading this tutorial.

The web is agog with news that if your site has a slow loading time, your search engine ranking could be affected and despite Google’s claim that this will only affect just less than 1% of sites, most bloggers aren’t taking chances and have started running to wordpress cache plug-ins to help them achieve faster blog/site load times.

Justin Germino of Dragon Blogger tried out W3 Total Cache and the experience kind of left him burnt as he writes in “Increasing Wordpress Page Load Performance Can Backfire“. Apparently neither WP-Super Cache nor W3 Total Cache works just right on his blog.

I’ve been using W3 Total Cache for months now and it’s been nothing but marvelous to me.

I must admit though that the plug-in can be quite tricky for the technologically disadvantaged but once it’s been configured as should be, it works wonders .

Depending on the settings you make use of, you could experience a rough time as did Justin thus I’ve decided to share with you my W3 Total Cache configuration settings in hope that it would help you speed up your blog

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Photo Credit: Mulad

Stop Spam Referrer PHP Script has joined the legion of anti-spam protection set up on my blog. It’s major function for me is to keep spammy referrers away from my blog.

Below is a capture of my AWSTATS Analytics showing my referrers. What is peculiar is that I can’t find a SINGLE LINK to my blog on most of these sites and that’s why they are SPAMMY REFERRERS.

Installing this Google Codes php script is quite easy breezy as you will come to see.

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