Every day hackers sit out there an pray on good sites for no good reason.  Some days they are even successful.  In the past few months I’ve worked with a few blogs to detect and remove hidden code that was causing various unwanted issues.  It happens to the best of blogs, and knowing how to find and remove it is just as important as trying to prevent it.

Blog #1 - The iFrame - The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load.  It seemed abnormally long.  I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.

When the did finally load, it then asked me if I wanted to run a Java applet.  Huge red flag there.  It took some digging but I found a lot of files contained some iFrame code that was loading badware from an external site.

To fix, I deleted and re-uploaded all the files I could, and walked though each theme and plugin file to find any traces of code that should not be there.  Once cleaned out, the site ran much smoother.

For a new blogger, getting comments or trackbacks is exciting. However, some of them could be automated spambots filling up your comments with links to sites you wouldn’t want your visitors seeing. Spam plugins can do wonders at stopping spam, but some manual work is required. Here are a few tricks to help new bloggers identify possible spam.

1- What name did the commenter leave? Was it Sam or Jill? Or was it Used Cars or Baby Blankets? Most spammers use keyword phrases as they think it’ll help out their site; which it won’t.

2- What URL did they leave as their homepage? Does the URL look like a laundry list of keywords? http://www.shop-for-ipods.com/ipod-deals/best-ipod-prices.htm. Trying to hard is an indication that the link may be spam.

3- Was their comment generic? Sure, not everyone leaves detailed comments, but an indication of spam may be a comment such as “Great Website”,”I’m really glad I found your blog”, “This is really good content.” Chances are that these comments came from someone who never read your post.

I received a comment yesterday on how Feedblitz emails had stopped arriving for one user.  I’m not sure what blog he’s subscribed (the issue wasn’t with this one) but there could be a handful of reasons why the email notifications are not arriving.  However, today I noticed that my Feedblitz alerts, that I had previously setup for a few blogs, were now showing up in my Gmail spam box.  I’m not sure what triggered the email to be marked as spam, however Gmail didn’t like it.

If you are subscribed to a blog via Feedblitz, and the emails stop coming, check your spam box and make sure they aren’t just getting filtered out.

[tags]feedblitz, spam, gmail[/tags]

Blogs sure are great, and owners are doing everything they can to optimize them for search engines, but what about people? There are a few usability plugins that make it easier for visitors to interact with your site.

Optimal Title / SEO Title : Good title tags are not just for search engines. They also appear in the users history and possibly bookmarks. Title tags should be specific -> generic. So, don’t start all your tittle tags with your blog name please.

Subscribe to Comments : Getting comments is one trick, keeping the people up to date on the comment discussion is important. I can’t think of how many times I’ve posted and then I couldn’t remember where I made my comments. Email notifications is a great way to get updates on comments and keep your visitors connected.

Chicklet Creator : A big feature of blogs is the syndication abilities. Having a feed is great, but making it easy to subscribe to is even better. (This is one of my projects.)

Spam Detection : Reading a blog full of viagra and casino comment spam is not fun. Chances are, it’ll annoy your users too and they’ll stop visiting.
- Akismet
- Spam Karma