Comment spam, a common form of spamdexing, has been a longstanding problem for blogs of all kinds. In search of “quick and easy backlinks” some people engage in it themselves, others hire “blog commenters” for as little as a couple hundred of bucks month (many which actually call themselves “SEO experts” and sell their services as “search engine optimization”), but the nature of this annoying tactic doesn’t change. It still has the word SPAM written across it.

For many bloggers — including those of us who use WordPress — Akismet has been a real savior from comment spam. However, no tool is 100% perfect, and every once in a while  a totally kosher comment lands in that “Spam” folder. To whitelist those good comments, it is good to make it your routine to check that spam folder every once in a while. I do it nearly daily. Every time I do I find some pretty entertaining spam comments. Today I thought it’d be fun to show some of them to you.

Here we go:

Puzzling wording:

An interesting dialogue is value comment. I think that it is best to write more on this subject, it may not be a taboo topic however generally people are not sufficient to speak on such topics.

Nothing else to add:

Nice informations for me. Your post has helpful. I wish to has valuable posts like yours in my blog. How do you find these posts?

A “***** enlargement” comment (at least they’re being honest!!)

It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website [url here]

No, no… No “mistake” there, baby!

Hi I discovered your webpage by mistake when i was searching Google…

Huh?!

Wonderful web page! I’ve a inquery to all who were born or perhaps expecting August 1 leap years or August 2 common years. What exactly do you think about this specific video: [link here]

What funny ones have you come across while blogging?

Less than a week ago in an intro to this post, I blogged how pleasing to my (and I’m sure every affiliate marketer’s) eye it is to see new developments at different affiliate networks. Now, in addition to ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network and LinkShare, we have AvantLink with their February news!

Yesterday they announced their very own (and a very robust one too) WordPress plugin. So immediately I have reached out to them to get a better idea of how it works, and how bloggers can/will benefit from this launch. This is how this post was born…

The AvantLink plugin for WordPress basically allows quick and simple integration with a number of the network’s integrated Affiliate tools & scripts. Once the plugin is installed and activated, there are several things to note within your WordPress admin panel.

1. Plugin users will see a “AvantLink WP” link in the admin sidebar, under the “Settings” section. Clicking that link opens the “AvantLink WP Plugin Settings” page, which includes four tabs that allow the configuration of several functions, including a product search engine via the AvantLink API (see image below).

2. Plugin users will see an AvantLink icon in their post editor’s kitchen sink. Clicking the icon will open a dialog box that allows affiliates to select any pre-configured ad type/unit (banner, text, video, etc.), from any merchant the affiliate is active with. It will also allow affiliates to create custom tracking links to any merchant URL they choose (see the two screengrabs below)

3. Plugin users will notice several new AvantLink WP widgets in the “Appearance” area of their WordPress admin. These include

• • AvantLink Product Ad Widget – Easy integration of any AvantLink Product Ad Widget (PAW) subscription that has been configured and saved.
  • AvantLink Product Search Form – Quickly enable an on site product search engine, using data from AvantLink merchants.
  • AvantLink Related Products – Display related products from AvantLink merchants driven by custom keyword searches.

It’s important to note that once the AvantLink WP plugin is installed and activated, an Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE) subscription is enabled by default on a site-wide basis. The ALE uses JavaScript to convert direct-to-merchant links to affiliate-tracking links on the fly, and within the end user’s browser. This of course can be deactivated via the settings page, if that’s preferred.

Several integrated tools and scripts from AvantLink offer unique and exclusive functionality free of charge to qualified affiliates, and now WordPress CMS affiliates can easily utilize these ad tools and subscriptions with simple, easy to configure widgets. Very nice development!

As the year draws to a close, and I’m looking into ways of improving my readers’ experience with my blog, I see that the numbers of those who access it via mobile devices has greatly increased since 2009 (as many of you probably know, I started blogging daily on 1/1/2009; so it is good/right to compare 2010 to 2009 now).

Here’s a vivid example: comparing the period of 10/27-12/26/2010 to the same period in 2009 we see a 746.15% increase in traffic this year:

However, as it is obvious from the above data, the considerable traffic increase hasn’t been coupled with significant improvements in the ways this traffic used/read the blog:

• Number of pages viewed per visit has gone up only by 7.23% (from 1.21 to 1.30)
• Average time on site increased just by about 17% (from 56 sec to 1 min 6 sec)
• Bounce rate has dropped only by about 11% (from 89.35% to 79.65%)

The lack of serious improvements is easy to explain: due to a fairly low traffic volume from mobile devices in 2009 nothing has been done to improve the mobile user’s experience with the blog in 2010 — nothing whatsoever.

However, now that I have already had over 4,100 visitors access my blog via their mobile devices in 2010 [see graph below], it is time to change something!

Yesterday morning I have installed WordPress PDA & iPhone plugin, and I’m already registering some improvement. The time on site of iPhone users (the most popular device people use to access my blog) has already more than doubled increasing from 00:38 to 01:29. Of course, it is too preliminary to make any conclusions, and I still have to see if there are better WordPress plugins available out there (WPtouch looks promising), but it is always good to register a quick improvement.

Is your blog mobile-friendly yet? If so, please share your tips on how you’ve achieved it (in the “Comments” area blow). I am certain that many people (myself in the first row!) will benefit from any additional tips.

If I were asked which WordPress plugins I would recommend to bloggers that use this popular platform, and want to enhance the usability component, I would list the following five:

1. Akismet [plugin's site] by Matt Mullenweg – Checks comments posted in your blog against their own database and places suspicious ones into a Spam folder. It does a great job, filtering all of the spam in your blog (hence, making it look much cleaner that it would’ve looked without this plugin), as well as makes your job of comment moderation much easier. Keep in mind though that occasionally (as often is the case with email spam filters too) a totally kosher comment may land in that Spam folder. So you want to look through the comments stored in this folder every once in a while (to whitelist the good readers).

2. Subscribe To Comments [plugin's site] by Mark Jaquith – Adds a check box that a commenting reader may tick if they want to be notified of replies to their comment(s). A must have if you want to really engage your audience, which is important not only for your blog’s popularity to grow, but also because some of the most important thoughts and conclusions are born in discussions.

3. WordPress Popular Posts [plugin's site] by Héctor Cabrera – Excellent plugin that sorts your previous blog posts by popularity. Popularity is defined by you. It can either mean “most comments” or “most views”. Regardless of the determinant that you choose, each post can still show both the number of views, and the number of comments (it is all easily customizable). I chose to use this plugin in combination with the Most Popular Posts plugin (which ranks posts by the number of comments one), and have one display posts in order of most views (giving a “Most Viewed Posts” header to this ranking), and the other – by most comments.

4. SexyBookmarks [plugin's site] by Josh Jones and Norman Yung – One really sexy plugin that allows for an array of social bookmarking options to be placed under each of your posts. See it in action right under this post.

5. Seesmic WordPress [plugin's site] by Seesmic Inc – Great plugin for adding video comments (recording them right within your own blog using Seesmic’s platform). Truly adds a new dimension of online communication and brings a blog alive. Even if your readers never use it, use it yourself!

I have arranged the above plugins in order of priority (you can live without video comments, but can’t without filtering those spam comments effectively). I use all of the above.

If I haven’t listed a plugin that in your opinion can greatly improve a WordPress blog’s usability, and enhance user engagement, please write about it in the comments area below. I am open to suggestions, ideas, and always eager to learn from the experience of others.