This article will cover everything you need to do to ensure that your VPS is performing as fast as possible, which mostly focuses on optimizing your memory usage. Please ensure you make backups of your existing my.cnf & httpd.conf we will not be held responsible for any problems.

What you will need to action this guide:

1. Your server specs (most importantly Guaranteed RAM & Burst RAM)
2. Access to your Web Host Support for installation of
3. Root access to your VPS via SSH
4. FTP Access to your server
5. A brief knowledge of an editior (i.e. VI) if not I’ll provide the commands you need to know
6. How to restart mysql & apache in your server operating environment
7. Access to WHM

Viewing your PHPinfo

Create a file called phpinfo.php & include the follow in it:

[coolcode] ?>[/coolcode]

Navigate to that file on your server i.e. http://www.yourserver.com/phpinfo.php, you should see something like this:

What you need to ask your host to do:

1. Ensure that you have the latest PHP version (currently 5.28)
2. Make sure that PHP is compiled with the latest version of Zend Optimizer, Eaccelerator & Ioncube Accelerator.
3. Ensure that you have the latest apache version (currently 2.0.63)

Viewing your current resource usage

Log in via SSH, I normally use the Putty client for this.

Commands:

top: your current server load & resource usage.
ps aux: all your processes & which ones are using the most memory/cpu
free -m: allocated memory, usage & free memory

If you use the top command you can get an overview of the load on the server & memory usage. You can see in the screenshot above my VPS has a load of 0.02 during the last 1minute, 5 minutes & 10 minutes.

No-one really knows what the ideal “load average” should be but my general rule is that anything over below 1 is good & above 1 is average. Above 3 & you may start to notice performance issues.

With memory usage you should ideally have 100MB or so free (if not more), you really need that buffer for large traffic spikes. If you’re coming close to your allocated memory usage then any allocated burst ram will kick in. On my server I have no burst ram, just guaranteed which means I don’t have that buffer, but my system is more stable (as everyone on the VPS can make use of the burst ram).

Removing & Tweaking Unnecessary Services

There’s a number of services that you can remove or tweak to increase performance. To remove any of these services log into WHM & go to Service Configuration > Service Manager or Cpanel > Plugins in the left menu.

Clamd: This is a virus scanning service, it uses up a ton of memory do generally I’ll remove it.

Entropy Chat: Disable this.

Spamd: This uses a lot of processes & memory. You shouldn’t remove this, instead we can tweak it. Go to Cpanel > Plugins & install spamdconf, once done go to the bottom of WHM & click on Setup Spamd Startup Configuration. Change the maximum children to 1 or 2. This will stop spamd spawning too many child processes.

Cpanel Tweak Settings

In WHM under Server Configuration > Tweak Settings:

1. Make sure default catch-all mail address is set to FAIL, this will use the least CPU time.
2. Untick Mailman, this is a resource hog.
3. Change the number of minutes between mail server queues to 180
4. Uncheck Analog Stats, I also usually uncheck Webalizer.
5. Make sure you tick delete each domains access logs after run, otherwise you’ll start using heaps of Disk Space.

Mysql Optimisation

You can edit your mysql configuration (/etc/my.cnf) by typing vi /etc/my.cnf

In order to add something in vi you need to hit insert, once completed hit esc then :wq to save & quit. If you want to save without quitting type :q!

There’s a few important variables that we’re going to tweak:

1. max_connections
2. wait_timeout
3. thread_cache_size
4. table_cache
5. key_buffer_size
6. query_cache_size
7. tmp_table_size

Via ssh you can type ‘mysqladmin variables’ to see their current values & you can also see a refreshed processlist by using the command ‘mysqladmin –i10 processlist extended-status’.

The settings below should work well for a server with 512MB Guaranteed RAM (also leaving you enough free for traffic spikes), if you have burstable then you can probably look at increasing the number of max_connections to 400 & possibly the key_buffer to 64M:

[coolcode]
[mysqld]
max_connections = 300
key_buffer = 32M
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 32M
join_buffer_size = 1M
read_buffer_size = 1M
sort_buffer_size = 2M
table_cache = 4000
thread_cache_size = 286
interactive_timeout = 25
wait_timeout = 7000
connect_timeout = 10
max_allowed_packet = 16M
max_connect_errors = 10
query_cache_limit = 2M
query_cache_size = 12M
query_cache_type = 1
tmp_table_size = 16M
skip-innodb
[mysqld_safe]
open_files_limit = 8192
[mysqldump]
quick
max_allowed_packet = 16M
[myisamchk]
key_buffer = 64M
sort_buffer = 64M
read_buffer = 16M
write_buffer = 16M
[mysqlhotcopy]
interactive-timeout[/coolcode]

Apache Optimisation

Apache settings are located in httpd.conf, you can use ‘locate httpd.conf’ or ‘whereis httpd.conf’ to find it.

Optimal settings for apache should look something like this, I like to keep the min & start servers slightly lower to stop too many child processes spawning & using memory:

[coolcode]
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 1
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
StartServers 5
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 1000[/coolcode]

Restarting Mysql & Apache

Once you’re done you’ll want to restart mysql & apache. You can do this via the command line or via WHM.

Restart Mysql: /etc/init.d/mysql restart (if mysql doesn’t restart consider commenting out skip-innodb in my.cnf)
Restart Apache: /etc/init.d/httpd restart

These commands may vary depending on what your server is running.

Monitoring Changes

Use the ‘top’ command, ‘free – m’ & ‘ps aux’ to get an idea of how the server is responding. Pay attention to how much RAM you have left & also how much CPU Mysql & Apache is using. You may need to leave Mysql running for 24-48 hours to get a true picture here.

Thinking about upgrading to a VPS but not sure who to choose, let us help you with our VPS Web Hosting Reviews, tailored specifically for Affiliate Marketers or check out some VPS Coupons also check out PhotonVPS

[coolcode]top – 19:56:30 up 27 days, 4:11, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.07, 0.09
Mem: 524288k total, 386432k used, 137856k free, 0k buffers[/coolcode]

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How to you check if you’ve been hacked

Via ftp go to the folder /wp-content/themes/ if there’s a file there named “remv.php” then you’re one of the unlucky ones.

What is remv.php?

It’s an application called PHPremoteView, it basically allows anyone to run any php commands on your server. This could result in a wide variety of damage (lost files, password, having your adsense code changed, affiliate url’s changed etc etc).

Currently most of the compromised installs are being used for DDOS attacks. So if you notice also an unusually high load on your server this could be the cause.

What to do to fix it

1. Delete the remv.php file first.
2. Look to see which files in the WordPress folder have been altered lately, it’s possible that your theme headers or footer could have unsuspecting spam links to pharma affiliate sites.
3. Export all your WordPress posts via XML then reinstall WordPress 2.7 & import your posts.
4. If you’re hosting multiple sites on your server you’ll want to check for all the files that have been modified within the time range since remv.php was created.
5. Change all your passwords, user, root, wordpress, mysql databases….everything.
6. Upgrade all your plugins to the latest versions (some might not work in 2.7 also).

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I’m sure these particular products ring a few bells, no doubt you’ve seen Akismet or Spam Karma wipe out comments promoting them. The reason people promote them is because there’s huge amount of profits involved. I’m not really worried about the profits though, I’m more worried about the techniques these spammers are using to promote their hosted pages to the top spots.

It’s impossible for someone to manipulate the serps like we see above with a brand new domain.

Lets take the Buy Xanax serps for instance, you’ll notice a few forums & a few .edu sites ranking up there. With anywhere up to 1,000 links pointing to that one page (the sources of which I’ll cover in a minute).

It’s all but impossible to buy a new domain & point this many links to it then expect it to rank. You’ll get slammed into the sandbox……fast. So instead, aged domains that carry weight are used instead. Google will somehow tolerate the mass amount of links with the same anchor text if the domain already has a significant amount of trust or authority.

Anyway, back to the original story. I noticed that many of these authority domains had backlinks from many high profile wordpress blogs.

Let’s for example look at Al Gore’s – Climate Crisis Blog, you can see that’s it’s linking to the edu page about xanax. Now let’s have a look at the source code:

You can see nicely concealed in a hidden div tag in the footer about 50 links (on every page) to other various drug related hosted pages.

Doing a bit more digging reveals that there are thousands of high profile blogs using WordPress that are compromised too. Most of the domains are PR5+.

So I suggest that you take a close look at your WordPress installation, especially the footer incase this has happened to you. I highly doubt that many of the people who have been hacked are aware that they are linking to potentially damaging websites.

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I found an awesome WordPress plugin after leaving a comment at Community Spark which allows you to send a customised email message to all new commenters on your blog. Immediately my eyes lit up as I thought aboutthe possibilities.

This allows you to do a number of things which ultimately make the experience for new users to your blog very very welcoming & personal.

It also has a large number of practical applications that allow you to convert visitors to feed subscribers or paying customers:

1. Greet them with a personal message & thank them for posting on your blog
2. Point them in the Direction of your RSS Feed
3. Recommend your favourite products & services
4. Ask them to sign up to your real mailing list
5. Direct them to some of your best post

The plugin is called Comment Relish & can be used on ANY type of blog to make money.

Lets look at a random real life example:

Say you run a web hosting blog like the guys over at the Hostican Blog. They could for example include a special discount offer to sign up to Hostican whenever someone comments on the blog. Or include something like “The top ten reasons you should switch to Hostican.” This could be said for any webhost or blog that has a product or service. Imagine physically sending a sales letter to everyone that comments on your blog. This could double your sales.

You could also sell advertising space in the email at a monthly rate.

The possibilities are endless as to how you use it (i’m sure some of you will come up with ingenious ideas), just remember that you’ve now added another potential source of revenue to your arsenal.

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I’m in the process of cleaning up my sidebar & putting more “clear defined” categories so this first tip ties in with that just nicely.

I find that with adsense if I use too strings in posts that are too long the Adsense ads can get quite a bit off target. I recently just used this plugin to migrate to shorter permalinks.

Originally I had the structure:

/%category%/%postname%/

However when using multiple categories the urls were becoming quite long & adsense was getting confused.

I’ve now migrated to merely:

/%postname%/

This has greatly increased the targeting of the Adsense ads & increased ctr by over 2% on some blogs.

Another handy feature of using the short permalinks is that I can now rearrange my whole sidebar & categories without making posts go 404 since the category name isn’t in the url anymore.

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It’s called the Link to me Textbox & you can see an example of it working at the bottom of this post.

The plugin itself is a nice call to action to have at the bottom of your posts. It asks the reader to link to the post if they enjoyed it & also supplies them with the Anchor Text that you’ve used as a title. If you ask someone to link to your post they’re much more likely to go ahead & do it. That’s what makes this plugin a gem.

You can download a copy of the Link to Me Textbox Here

I’d possibly like to see an additional feature to the plugin where you can set a custom field to pull the anchor text from.

For example “link_text” would allow you to target the anchor text in the textbox & vary it. This would allow you make links into Deep Posts look more natural & increase keyword breadth.

I also like how the textbox seperates the social networking widgets like Bumpzee from the post, I could potentially add more in that space with cluttering things up.

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More & more people now are valuing Deep Links over Front Page Links simply because of relevance. I’d rather have a deeply relevant link than a link on a homepage from a blog that bears no relevance to mine at all.

Textlinkads now allows you to increase your blog revenue even more by advertising at a Post Level. You can sell one ad per post that can be anywhere up to 80 characters long with a 150 character description.

It looks something like this:

If I was able to earn say $30+/month per post that would not only make me want to write longer & more advertisable posts but it would also finally help me give adsense the boot from this blog I reckon. Kontera is doing better on Earners Blog than Adsense at the moment although that’s for another post. I’m not entirely sure of pricing at the moment

In order to be eligable for this you need to register for Textlinkads or if you already have an account you just need to upgrade your WordPress plugin.

More info as it comes!

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So let’s get back into things. First up I’ve managed to wittle down the Blog Reviews to the last 7 of which I’ll be announcing today or tomorrow.

Secondly I thought I’d give you a little insight on how to really double your blog traffic from search engines.

On a blog there’s three types of traffic (excluding paid).

Direct Traffic: This is traffic that you get from feed subscribers & regular visitors.

Referral Traffic: The traffic that you get when you trackback, your blog is mentioned on another site or you get dugg.

Organic Traffic: The traffic that you generate from search engines.

You can manipulate each of these three traffic sources in different ways, however many people fail to do one thing in particular with their blog & that’s leverage off old posts. The focus of any blogger is to keep up to date with current affairs & stories so they can be the first to break an important piece of information & as a result leverage heavily off referral traffic & returning users.

However, what if there was a way to really bring your old posts back in style? Well now there is.

One of my main gripes & possibly the only one I ever had with wordpress was that you couldn’t set the page title (what we see between the <title> tags) independantly from the post title (the name of the post). Therefore this post would end up having the title “SEO Title Tag + Wordtracker = Goodness” which isn’t really very optimised for the Search Engines.

The rest of this post will show you how to optimise your title tags for WordPress in a way that will enable you to bring your old posts back from the dead & start generating decent traffic. Remember, if we managed to double each posts daily visitor count you’d be doubling your search engine traffic.

Here’s the process:

1. Installing WordPress Plugins
2. Grabbing a list of all the posts contained within your blog
3. Exporting the posts into an excel file that we can use to work on the title tags in a neat format
4. Research the title tags using Wordtracker’s free tool
5. Set the title tags in WordPress using the plugin
6. Sit back & measure results

So here comes the fun part, first up you need to be using wordpress for the following plugin to work:

Download the SEO Title Tag Plugin & Install it

There’s two important advantages to installing this plugin:

1. You can set independant title tags for pages, posts, categories & tags
2. You can get rid of your blog name coming before or after every post in the <title tag>

Once you’ve followed the instructions it’s time to grab a list of all the posts contained within your site. Download Xenu (which is free).

Xenu will allow you to grab a list of all the posts indexable in the search engines from your blog. To do this simply:

1. Goto File
2. Check URL
3. Input the URL of your Blog
4. Hit OK
5. When it’s done hit Control + T then save it on the desktop

You now have a tabbed file with all the posts from your blog. It’ll also contain other stuff in there like affiliate links, images etc so we need to clean it up.

1. Open up the file in Excel & just delete columns B through to M
2. Next highlight column A then hit Data then Sort & hit Ok.
3. Now go down the column & delete all the URL’s that aren’t posts.

You should now have a nice Excel file with your posts in Alphabetical format. Now name Column A (Post) & name column B (Title Tag).

You can now use this excel file to work on the title tags for all of the posts in your blog. I also like to make other columns where I can chart the increase of traffic using a particular title tag but you don’t need to do that.

Now open up the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from wordtracker.

The aim here is to research much better title tags for your pages that will bring in traffic. So lets use this page as an example:

This page concentrates on Wordtracker, Title Tags & Increasing Traffic so I’ll get some numbers from those phrases & see if I can come up with anything else.

There’s not too much traffic for Wordtracker or Title tags & the term “Increase Blog Traffic” looks quite good. However it appears that term would be quite hard to leverage any traffic off since the top result has been featured on the front page of digg (& possibly other sites like techmeme) & also has 119 inbound links to that page alone.

Therefore I would then normally try & leverage traffic off the name of the plugin as I would assume a plugin like this would become pretty popular given what it allows you to do.

This would in turn give me a title tag such as: “SEO Title Tag for WordPress & Increasing Blog Traffic using Wordtracker” which is a good bit more seo friendly & should drive twice as much traffic, if not more than the original title.

Once I’ve decided on the title for a particular page I’ll then move onto the next page in the Excel list.

Another good reason to have a good title is for linking. If someone decides to link to your article, chances are they’ll use the title tag as the Anchor Text, so having keyword rich title tags can also help your rankings in more ways than one

I implemented this exact method less than 5 days ago & I’ve already seen a 32% increase in referrals from Search Engines.

Enjoy.

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The main problem lies with the WordPress Caching however there are also some simple server tweaks that you can apply to help streamline things even further.

I must admit I’ve applied a few of these tweaks to this blog but I’ve always known that my content isn’t overly “diggable” what with it being about SEO & Affiliate Marketing :p But regardless you should see a nice reduction in server load & mysql queries.

Upgrade to WordPress 2.7

WordPress 2.1 contains a lot of performance upgrades over previous versions. It contains much more efficient database code as all of the queries were carefully examined by some stop Mysql programmers before the release.

Install the WP Super Cache Plugin

WP-Cache 2.10 will cache a physical copy of each post into a specified folder on your server. Since WordPress usually serves content dynamically it has to query mysql everytime it goes to load a post. If you get dugg you’ll end up with an insane amount of mysql queries that your server won’t be able to handle. Since this plugin creates a static copy of the page on the server you’re not actually loading any content from the database at all therefore the post will:

1. Load Quicker
2. Put less strain on the server

In theory you are able to server literally hundreds more pages per second than you normally would have before.

Choose the right Webhost

Naturally having a dedicated server with a fast processor & heaps of ram is considered the best there are less expensive options that you can consider.

If you have a VPS, please make sure you read my VPS Optimization Guide which will really give you the lowdown on tuning MYSQL & HTTPD.

The following Shared Hosts have been tested to be Digg Proof but it all depends on how many users are on your node & also how big the strain is on your server:

1. MediaTemple
2. Dreamhost
3. GoDaddy
4. A2Hosting
5. A Small Orange
6. Webfaction

Mysql Query Cache

Since pages are served dynamically every page load in WordPress results in a Mysql Query, as stated before the WP-Cache plugin helps to reduce these queries but it’s also important to make sure you have the Query Cache optimised for maximum performance.

To activate the Mysql Query Cache:

1. Find your mysql configuration file my.cnf
2. Find the setting query-cache-type & change the value to 1
3. Find the query-cache-size & change the value to 20M
4. Find the query-cache-limit & change the value to 2M

You will need to make sure your host allows root access to the server in order to do this tweak.

PHP Compiler Cache

The PHP Compiler cache saves scripts in their compiled format on the server so that they’re not getting recompiled every time you call them from WordPress.

It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimises scripts to speed up their execution. It typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

Two popular Compiler Caches are APC & eAccelerator however I’m not going to go into any details about installing or configuring them.

Disable Unused Plugins

Disable any plugins that you currently don’t utilise in the plugins section of wordpress. It’s easy to leave 30-50 plugins active even when you’re not using them simply because most webmasters will try out so many different versions of a particular plugin.

Configuring Apache for Maximum Performance

Check out the complete guide to configuring apache for maximum performance this will help you make those fine tweaks to your httpd.conf. You’ll need root access to do this.

Optimising your Mysql Database

Optimising your Mysql Database can have a huge performance on your load times & load on the server, especially if you have a big database. Check out this picture of the effect it had on Weblogtools collection cpu usage.

Optimising your Mysql database is pretty easy:

1. Log into PHPMyAdmin
2. Locate your WordPress DatabaseTables
3. Make a Backup First
4. Check all the tables in the Check Boxes
5. Select the Optimise Tables Option
6. That’s it!

I’ve also heard rumours that switching to InnoDB instead of MyIsam can have an effect on performance although I’ve not tested that myself, in fact I’m not even sure if it’s possible without causing errors.

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Sometimes it can be difficult getting backlinks to these types of sites. Especially to the dedicated product review pages & many people completely overlook the power of Trackbacks in WordPress.

A trackback basically places a link on another site letting them know you’ve mentioned their post or your post is related to theirs. The good thing about a trackback is that it’s almost as good as a free link.

I’m not going to get into the discussion of “but most trackbacks are rel=nofollow” because I can tell you now, trackbacks DO help you rank & DO help you get indexed quickly.

Eli at Bluehatseo showed me some proof last week that you can get a whole 178 page site indexed in 2 days from using trackbacks only & I’ve seen the benefits myself.

Anyway, if I’m reviewing a product or service I’ll normally fire the keywords into Comment Hut (if you’re cheap you can just use Google Search or Blog Search). I usually use all three because it allows me a greater depth of search. I’ll grab all of the URL’s & sort them by pagerank & relevancy (talk about the same product or service I’m posting about). I’ll then trim the list down to anywhere from 5-20 blogs.

Then I’ll grab all the trackback URL’s from the blogs & put them in the trackback section in the post in WordPress. Whenever I hit publish there’s automatically instant links on anywhere from 5-20 sites that are relevant to my content.

Some webmasters do delete trackbacks, I know I do if they’re spammy. But if you’re writing good articles with good content most Webmasters will actually be flattered to get a trackback, as they think you’re “citing” them.

Quite often I’ll also get the other webmaster even signing up to my RSS Feed or becoming a regular reader of the blog when they notice the trackback, so there’s other advantages to making sure you utilise this technique more often.

A great example of a post that would kill trackbacks would be something like “The Top 500 WordPress Themes ever released” then submit a trackback to every single wordpress theme release page. It’d take time to put together but you can see where I’m heading with this post. Be Creative!

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See, as you probably all know I’m a huge fan of building review sites.

Sites that review products or services have been & are some of my biggest earners. I’ve actually got a post lined up soon all about review sites so look out for that.

Anyway, before I’ve been using a mash up of php scripts to achieve my desired look & feel. Which is nice but I had always wanted to build review sites from inside WordPress. I love the layout, design & ease of use.

Well now you can transform WordPress into a Review Blog or site with WP Review Site. The plugin allows you to a do number of things:

• Define categories of ratings you wish to collect, the minimum and maximum rating, and the display order of your rating categories.
• Collect ratings along with every comment.
• Display ratings collected for each comment.
• Display average rating from all collected ratings for a post.
• Display the number of positive or negative ratings for each post (50% or higher overall rating based on your scale).
• Manage rating categories easily from your WordPress admin options tab.
• Define HTML to appear before and after rating labels and inputs easily from your WordPress admin options tab with no complicated function arguments.
• Drop-in to any existing blog to add ratings. Simply doesn’t display anything for comments or posts that didn’t include ratings.
• Flexible enough to be used as a post rating system, or to drive an entire rating & review site built on WordPress, depending entirely on how you customize the output.

Screenshot:

The above screenshot shows the plugin in action. Please note that this is not something you can simply activate in wordpress & it’ll work as beautifully as this. You will have to edit templates & style it into your blog accordingly.

The beauty of such a plugin is that you initially review a product or service yourself, give an overview of it. Then you readers submit their own reviews. This instigates much more user interaction. You can then link every review to your affiliate link of the product. Review sites convert like hotcakes, mainly because they are the go between before someone decides whether or not to buy the product. Show them the way

I’m currently working on a few new review sites at the moment & I’m excited about getting my hands dirty with this plugin.

Features I’d like to see:

1. Sorting Categories by Review Score
2. Ability to Adjust Review Figures from the WordPress Backend
3. Ajax type bar graphs as output
4. More seemless integration without as many Templates changes

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Well chances are that if you’re using wordpress & you’ve not set up your robots.txt correctly then you’ll be getting heaps of pages indexed that you don’t want.

What don’t you want indexed:

1. Your Plugins & Content Folder
2. Categories
3. Galleries & Images
4. Feeds & Trackbacks

What you DO want indexed:

1. Posts
2. Pages
3. Sitemap

Shoemoney had a similar problem a few weeks ago (And most people think he’s an SEO?). What happens in that in order to rank a page in the main index Google must attribute a minimum pagerank value to it. If it falls below the threshold it’ll hit supplemental. So you need to make sure that your site has a good distrubution of pagerank or authority. So if most of your links are hitting your homepage & you’re second level of navigation are your categories then you’re losing heaps of link popularity that should be going to your posts instead.

Ony my blogs I’ve implemented the following robots.txt with reasonable success (50% more pages indexed):

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /trackback/

There is a good set of reasoning behind doing this on all of your sites. You should almost be telling the engines which pages you want to rank & which pages you don’t. Removing the pages that are worthless to the engines & only serve as a navigation between different parts of the site increase the relevance & internal linking power of other pages.

I have a Joomla content site that has more category pages than static pages. So I exlcluded all the category pages & my traffic has jumped from around 500 uniques/day to 1500 in about 8 days. Gotta love Everflux

Remember if you have unique content on your blog & you’re still suffering from Supplementals you need to get some links to your main page & internals, never stop this cycle of linkbuilding or linkbaiting.

I’ve received about 4 or 5 reviews about Earners Blog that I asked for last week, I’m still looking for a lot more. So keep em coming. There’s $25 & an SEO Audit in it for you.

I also think that the DNS is still settling after the switch to the new hosting, so some of you may still be seeing & commenting on the old version of the site. I’ll try to get the databases synced so we don’t lose some of the comments

In other news check out Eli’s new post about Power Indexing sites with a large number of pages.

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I didn’t get to see the list but I can probably guess a few of the names on there.

Anyway, WordPress has already patched the issue at hand & I suggest that all of you regulars update your blogs to avoid any possible vulnerabilities.

WordPress 2.0.7 Fixes:

• Security fix for wp_unregister_GLOBALS() to work around the zend_hash_del_key_or_index bug in PHP 4 versions less than 4.4.3 and PHP 5 versions less than 5.1.4 with register_globals set to “On.”
• Feeds now properly serve 304 Not Modified headers instead of mismatched 200/304 headers (a.k.a. the FeedBurner bug).
• Backport of another 304 Not Modified fix from WordPress 2.1
• Deleting WordPress Pages no longer gives an “Are You Sure?” prompt.
• After deleting a WordPress Page, you are now properly redirected to the Edit Pages screen.
• Sending an image at original size in Internet Explorer no longer adds an incorrect “height” attribute.

WordPress 2.0.7 Patch

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So I came across a plugin that enables you to split the comments & trackbacks into separate lists. This tidies up your comments section & also makes your comments much more enjoyable to read & also reduces excess spam on the page that could have a negative effect on your keyword density.

The Plugin is for WordPress only, I’m pretty sure that some of the other platforms have this function built in already. The Plugin is called Trackback List.

The plugin basically filters through all of your comments & raises a flag if there are any trackbacks. If it finds any it returns them in a list format that you can call using a different function.

The plugin is simple, easy to install. You can see it in action on this blog

Download Trackback List v1.2

Related Resources:

• WordPress Plugins
• Top SEO Tools

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So here’s a quick tip that I’ve started using lately to make sure I keep my blog content as fresh as possible.

Instead of spending a few hours every night making posts, why not sit down & dedicate a set number of hours at the start of the week & write the posts in advance? This can be good especially if you’ve got lots of ideas floating around but don’t want to blog them all at once.

WordPress has a nifty built in feature that allows you to schedule posts in the future. You’ll notice it on the right hand menu whilst writing a post. The timestamp feature:

The Timestamp tab allows you to schedule posts in the future, or even in the past if you like! The advantages of something like this to a blogger is invaluable. You could simply write all your posts at the beginning of the week & schedule them throughout the week to post themselves. You could also schedule posts whilst you’re away on holidays.

How’s it done?

If you hit the edit timestamp tab then put in the time you’d like the post to be published you can schedule it for whenever you like. The trick is to not hit save on the post but to actually publish it like you normally would. Otherwise it’ll not publish it at the right time.

So now you’ll be able to free up more of your time for research, playing video games or spending valuable time down the pub with your mates

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Template Only Plugins

Adsense Beautifier: This WordPress Plugin will add images & a visible border (to comply with the Adsense TOS) next to your Adsense. This increases your CTR & visibility of the ads.

Inline Plugins (Inside Post)

Adsense Injection: Rather than include Adsense in your template this plugin will randomly insert it into your posts. You can choose any of the sizes & how often you’d like it to appear. The plugin randomly shifts where it inserts Adsense to make it look more natural this helps to avoid Ad Blindness & Increase CTR.

Displaying Earnings

Adsense Earnings: This WordPress Plugin will show your Adsense Earnings on the WordPress Admin Panel, so you can view them whenever you log in.

Adsense Profit: This WordPress Plugin allows you to display your Adsense Earnings to people visiting your site.

Revenue Sharing Plugins

Adsense Revenue Sharing: With this WordPress Plugin you can share your Adsense Earnings with other authors on your blog & also your friends.

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This version of the plugin works seamlessly without even having to change any templates or modify any code.

It will place a small Digg Icon at the bottom of every post which when clicked will allow the user to Submit your story to Digg.

Once it detects that your story has been submitted it then changes into the icon the right showing how many Diggs the post has accumulated. This kind of auto detection has not worked in other versions of similar plugins. However it works perfectly with Digg This Reloaded.
The advantages of a plugin like this are:

• Make it quick & easy for people to Digg your Posts
• If someone visits your site via Digg they can Digg the post from the Button rather than having to go back to Digg.
• It can increase your chances of making it to the front page of Digg

The plugin is free & can be downloaded here:

Download Digg This | Visit Developers Site

Rumor has it that the plugin will also accommodate Del.icio.us soon aswell.

Recommended Resources:

• WordPress Plugins

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