Not that long ago, I put out our new Comment Rules  for the Redneck Bar and Grill. I didn’t really expect spammers to read them, but it made me feel a little better just to put it into words. Following all the hassle with our site being hacked, I decided that the time had come to clean up the joint. Lame comments and spam have no place here. (Read this post if you need to know why you should upgrade your WordPress installation.)

I figure other bloggers will understand where I was coming from. Most of our readers do. Even if they aren’t “real” bloggers and are just in it for whatever money they can scrounge up by leaving lame comments in an attempt at gaining links for their “niche” sites.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve visited quite a few Dofollow blogs myself in order to promote my other sites.  The thing is, I always tried to find posts on which I had a real comment to give, which involved reading. I also followed the rules, if they were visible, such as using a first name or not using any keywords.  I would end up reading a lot more than commenting, which takes a lot of time but was very interesting.

We deleted several hundred comments this week, a lot of them actual out and out drug spam. I kinda miss the sex spam, it was more interesting to read before deleting. All of these stupid Tamiflu spams are borriinngg! Then we deleted a few that completely broke our rules for this site but seemed like they might be written by actual bloggers. For instance, here is one left by a person named Folders Printing:

I do not agree with this clause you put above

“Keywords are allowed. We have the handy dandy Keyword Luv plugin and we encourage it’s use. However, you need to use this tool properly. I want to see your name, and then your keyword, like this: Johnny@Truck Nuts or Suzanne@Scrap Book Stickers. If your name isn’t first, then forget it! Delete!”

As i have seen so many commenters not following this, they use only their keywords as their name, what about that, you should consider all equally.

Well, Folders, sorry you don’t agree with our rules. Guess what? Too bad. Not only do I not find your comment funny or clever, but you’re parents gave you a really lousy name. Mr. and Mrs. Printing really dropped the ball. I bet with a name like Folders, grade school was hell. But that’s nothing compared to the handle on this next commenter. Lets see what Gestational Diabetes had to say for him (her?)self:

“I like this posting! It helps a lot of people especially those who are suffering from gestational diabetes. Aside from the details mentioned above, are there any other information you can share?”

Gestational, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that your comment was not quite fully developed. It needs to go back into the oven. Your premature typing needs a little more research. For instance, were you aware that virtually the entire post you commented on was pure fiction, conceived by us? It might surprise you to know that a lot of our details “mentioned above” are illegitimate. I suggest you abort your attempts to spam us. Also, there are no any other information we can share.

There were a few others, but Folders Printing and Gestational Diabetes sure took it this week. I’m sure there will be a few more in the spam folder before long.

That’s right it’s another post about the wide world of spam.  Now, I know what you’re thinking; man, he must be completely out of any new ideas at all if he’s going to this well again spam is such a complex topic that I’m certain he has something fresh to say about it.

Back in July, last year, I noted that we felt we had achieved a major goal when we hit the 1000 spam mark.  Little did I know how much we would take off in the time since then.  Just a couple of days ago (okay I’ve been procrastinating battling the weasel flu, it’s been almost two weeks) we surpassed 50 000 spam comments.

I have to hand it to the spammers out there, they are definitely getting more creative.  Some of them take quotes right out of the post, some of them steal our Beer Buddies’ names to try and slip the spam in that way and some of them are even going so far as to steal our Beer Buddies comments and try to pass them off as their own.  That last one I’ve noticed on two separate occasions (coincidentally both times it was a comment by Steve-The Trade Show Guru that got stolen, and his title has been stolen a few times as well [congratulations Steve the spammers like you, they really like you]).  Unfortunately, sometimes when moderating the comments I’m a bit hung-over from too many Blue Beaver Beers tired from working so hard, so I may have let some thieves slip by thinking that they were being witty all on their own.

There has been one unfortunate side effect from all of these spam related shenanigans (spananigans?)  Sometimes people will leave what seems to be a legitimate clever/witty comment but when I click on the link back to their site it will be in some foreign language.  Now I don’t want to seem prejudiced and I’m sorry that I can’t read Esperanto but I just don’t know what your web-site is saying.  It could be inciting everyone to spread total anarchy throughout the world by leaving cupboard doors ajar.  I simply cannot condone such behavior.

Recently, Tim brought something disturbing to my attention.  It seems that The Redneck is being frequently visited by spam-bots.  At first I didn’t see the problem with this because I thought spam-bots were just the machines that work in the factory that produces that wonderfully tasty luncheon meat.  Then I found out that these particular ‘bots were the ones that produce that other kind of spam (or what I like to call tofu) the kind that no one in the whole blog-o-verse enjoys.

Most of the time these annoying little bastards just leave comments about how great amoxicillin is.  Lately, though, they seem to be getting a little smarter.  They are leaving what seem like legitimate comments like, “This is very good advice.  Thank-you.”  This way if I’m not paying close attention I think that they really did read the post and I will approve the comment.  As if that’s not bad enough, these robotic douche-bags are trying to usurp the identities of our Beer Buddies.  I’ve ran across comments that are supposedly written by; Canucklehead, Trade Show Display, Hari, Tammy, Absolutely True and Jean-Luc Picard.  I even found one that used Tim’s name, plus there are several by Harvey Bilchick, who is not actually a real person at all.  However, if I click on the back-link to their site, it becomes readily obvious that these “people” are not who they say they are.  They’re trying to trick me; but, like the saying goes, “I may have fallen off the beer and turnip wagon at night, but it wasn’t last night.”  I wise to you.   Now for any of our Beer Buddies who haven’t had their identities stolen all I can say is, just be patient I’m sure it will happen for you soon enough.

Unfortunately, I’m not really sure how to get rid of these damn, dirty tofu-bots.  If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears (which makes my face look really funny).  I will do my very best to weed out these impostors and continue to fight the good fight.  But first, it’s time for a nutrition break.  I’m having spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.

I was recently over at Lissie’s Passive Income Online site, trying to figure out what was going on with the whole Site Build It Review thing that was mentioned on a couple other blogs out there. I think the whole argument speaks for itself, so I won’t get into the pros and cons or the rudeness of various players in the ‘debate’. Let’s just say things got a little heated, especially when Vic got in there!

I did read all of the comments to the review Lissie put out there. While many of these were downright funny in a pitiful ‘you don’t get it do you’ kind of way, I picked up a couple interesting points that really never clicked for me before. Here is Griz’ comment on Lissie’s blog, as he is attempting to educate an SBI’er:

“Vacuum cleaners… lol.

An oil filter keyword. A term searched by people who don’t know how to define what they are looking for. Once the serp page opens they realize that what is on the page isn’t what they are looking for and type a new query like “how to fix my hoover” and then “who fixes hoover vacuum cleaners in timbuctoo”.

People don’t buy vacuum cleaners online”

This points out exactly what is wrong with some of the sites I have been working on.  Basically, my keywords don’t result in much useful traffic because they aren’t defined enough. I now think back to my own searches online, where I get to the first results window and think, “All of these suck! I’ll just try another search…”

I guess I’m realizing it isn’t enough to get ranking for a keyword or niche. People have to actually get to your site!  Serious income will only be found if you are in a niche where people will buy online, or are willing to click on an ad, and where there is a lot of these motivated people. Or each clickthrough is high priced. Right there I can throw away all 3 of the projects I was about to start this month. My keywords seem to be either not defined enough, or for some obscure thing that hardly anyone will ever search for. I can get all the backlinks I want and it won’t make me more than some coffee money.

Damn it! How can I keep forgetting how to research?

On the positive side tho, Lissie inadvertently saved me all that hard work I was about to put out there for perhaps nothing. So thanks Lissie, and thanks Griz. Eventually some of the info you give away for free at Make Money Online with Grizzly will beat its way through my thick skull.

Beware: Non Bloggers will find this a tad Bit Boring! But if you want Backlinks, Bear with me. The rest of you might as well Begone, or Bend over to take a Bludgeoning of Bewildering Backlink Bull$hit in the Backside the likes of which you have never Been Blasted By Before…..

It is amazing the lengths people go to to get backlinks to their blog. They beat themselves black and blue, bend over backwards, doing backflips to get other bloggers to bend their way. I’m no different. I have rushed hither and yon like a chicken with it’s head cut off, following good and bad advice with abandon. The only thing about it is, all this activity sure has shown me what doesn’t work well for my situation, as well as what does. This morning I have done some serious house cleaning on my online portfolios, ditching a bunch of useless dot info sites that I don’t need and trying to figure out if I should scrap even a few of the dot coms or just ‘farm’ them out (wink wink nudge nudge). My biggest problem is lack of time, what with a full time job of over 70 hours per week and a family and a social life, etc. I don’t need to spend all of my valuable time on sites that have tanked and are just wasting internet space.

I used to participate in link memes and other crazy stuff to try to get traffic. I spent hours on ‘social linking‘ activities, trying to get ‘friends’. While this did get me some results, mostly what it got me was really busy and out of time. A lot of people will count social sites like facebook as entertainment. You know, if all I want is entertainment I would be better off picking up a book or going to see a movie. Facebooking is more like turning oneself into a computer zombie with limited typing opportunities. If I’m gonna be a zombie, I might as well be a sci fi movie zombie, so I can eat popcorn without getting my keyboard all greasy.

Dofollow comments have gotten me results, as has Keyword Luv. In fact, they seem to be really helpful. The problem is the time it takes to visit all those blogs and actually read them in order to make a relevant comment. A lot of us just fall behind on the time and energy. Also, leaving comments will never get you right to the top in the search engines, and I think this was confirmed at Make Money Online With Grizzly although I don’t recall exactly where on his site I found that tidbit. Since he is one of the Top Bears I tend to believe his info. Also, after leaving hundreds of dofollow comments, I never did reach number one for any of the keywords I targeted. Go figure. It did help, but just couldn’t get me over the hump.

One really useful activity is writing and submitting articles to directories so that others can use them on their sites. Every time you get free backlinks and it works really well. The problem is it takes a lot of time and energy to submit all of those articles. Even with a service like Unique Article Wizard it is still very time consuming. However, that service does speed up the process a lot. For a better explanation of article submissions and such, read this Unique Article Wizard Review.

By far one of the most successful services I have used is ConnectContent, which I discussed in my post How to Build Backlinks For Beginners. I have had quite a bit of luck getting results from this site, and it is highly recommended by many ‘gurus’ out there including Grizzly. And speaking of which, backlinks are also findable at Griz’ site so go check it out if you haven’t already.

From my lowly position at the bottom of the SEO pile, I guess my conclusion is that for most of us, moving up in the SERP’s is going to take time, persistance and work. Basically, persistance is the main virtue of most endeavours. Without that one thing you might as well forget huge successes online. Without persistance, you probably won’t succeed in marriage, child rearing, brick and mortar and real life carreers, or any other worthwhile endeavour. Heck, without persistance, you can’t even wade through all the crap on TV to find a decent program. Now excuse me while I get in a little ‘me’ time. Where is that remote?

Ah, those wacky backlinks. Everyone wants a whole honkin’ armload of ‘em. Trouble is, it seems so confusing at first. What are backlinks? Are there good ones and bad ones? Where can I get them? Do they actually honk? Hopefully after you read this you will have a few clues on how to build backlinks for beginners. If you don’t have a website or blog this will probably perplex, bore or lose you in short order. Sorry, next time I will try to be more entertaining.

A backlink is simply one website linking ‘back’ to another. The reason they are valuable is that your site, blog post or other online missive will be ranked higher by the search engines (such as Google). A high SERPS ranking means traffic. And traffic is good! Unless you are in road construction, and then it is just a pain in the rear…

A backlink is always good, but some are way more valuable than others. The most common links back to your site might be comments on other blogs, online friends referring to your posts, or someone sending visitors to look at a picture, etc. A lot of the time these links are to your name, or “this article” or ‘Hat Rack Blog”. A really good backlink would be one like “how to build backlinks for beginners.” Why?
Because people might actually search for that phrase or those keywords online. They won’t probably search for “this article”, so Google will never send you any traffic because someone else’ site linked to you with the anchor words “this article”.

Where can you get excellent backlinks? Well, you can ask for them. If someone links to your article about golf shirts with an anchor like “here”, you could email them and ask if they would change it to “designer golf shirts” or whatever keywords you are looking to get traffic for. You can trade links with other sites, preferably relevant ones. A relevant site such as “Grady’s Golfing Tips” can give your golf shirts a much better link than “Stupid Funny Videos”. Unless there is a post with a funny golf video, then the link could also be good from there.

Writing ezine articles, leaving dofollow comments, making link badges, and the list goes on. I’m not an expert on any of these topics so I will let you research these on your own.

The best way is still to communicate with other site owners to obtain high quality, one way relevant backlinks with your chosen keywords. Sound hard?  A search engine community network such as ConnectContent can help you work toward obtaining these links with a minimum amount of work.

Is this type of thing ‘legal’? Will you get in trouble for it with the G man? The answer is no. All the ConnectContent network does is allow members to communicate their link term preferences to other members.

So if you are a blog owner or  website builder in need of quality backlinks, take a look at ConnectContent.

Hopefully this brief post gives you some helpful information on how to build backlinks for beginners.

“Not long ago, when there were men on the bottling lines, this sort of thing didn’t happen!”

(The first lucky duck that can name the movie that line was quoted from gets a hats off and a virtual beer basket in their gmail  )

Recently my friend JD from I Do Things had her blog hacked by some loser, possibly one sporting a mullet and with a serious brain worm infestation. Fortunately,  JD was able to restore her site with relative ease. She warned us to make plenty of WordPress backups and upgrade our WordPress files. Some of her readers went so far as to make backups of their backups.

I took these prudent steps forthwith, and then I started thinking about that poor lost soul who maliciously hacks and stabs deep into the hearts of innocent files, corruptifying them and rendering them useless and unrecognizable. He (or she) obviously cares little for those files, viewing them as merely things to be manipulated. Does this modern mullet sporter have no shame? Are the brain worms in control now?

I think this dismisbegotten file crusher doesn’t play well with others. Probably not enough love as a child. Maybe Santa brought him a Brite Lite instead of the Operation Game. It could be his hampster’s upscale home was replaced with low income housing. Maybe he was chased about the house by an older sibling who was wearing Finger Forks, and yelling ” I’m Freddy Krueger, welcome to my nightmare!” This person obviously has little in common with a certified ethical hacker.

Whatever his problem is, I don’t understand the motivation for blog vandalization. He (or she) needs to chill out, crack open a Blue Beaver Beer and play some World of Warcraft or something. Or even better, get a life and for gosh darn sakes, get rid of the freakin’ mullet! An oh, yeah, if you need to borrow my ginormous tweezers to remove those brain worms, I have ‘em right here behind the bar.

The Spam-Master giggled insanely as he fed keywords into his Spametrater Deluxe program, rubbing his hands together with glee. “This time I’ll make millions. Millions! Bow down before me, innocent bloggers! I will torment you for all eternity! Ha ha ha ha ha!”

Spam is like mosquitoes. Annoying, frustrating, yet you can live with the bastards by crushing them with your mighty Akismet covered Fist of Justice. You never get back all the time you waste hunting down the buzzing little menaces and squashing them like easily squashable things, though. All you get is the amusement and amazement at the contents of the spametry.

Some of it is downright unpleasant. I hesitate to even get into what these foul minded spamheads come up with, and I won’t gross you out by reprinting their mind excrement. Unfortunately, there are those out there looking for what they have, but that’s another story. Some of it is confusing. And some of it is ridiculous, like this one:

to: Admin – If You want to delete your site from my spam list, please sent url of your domain to my e-mail: blah blah blah (removed by me for security reasons)
And I will remove your site from my base within 24 hours
webmastegz

I just don’t get this one. The guy is basically saying, “I’m the a$$hole who sends you all this spammy $hit. You probably are enjoying it immensely and want to thank me. But if by some chance you find it inappropriate, rude or bothersome, simply email me and I will stop forthwith!” If you actually answer the email, he most likely sells your email address on the open market, with Sucker in big letters beside it.

A while back we celebrated how We Finally Made it to 1000 Akismet crushed false comments. Now, we are up to over 14,000 spamtastic comments deleted! And once, I published a little Spametry (yes, that is a word!),compiled from bits I scraped out of the ‘ole Akismet dumpster. I thought I’d pick a few more pieces for everyone’s perusal. Enjoy!

Elizabeth had pretending madness erased
Brock said the deathbed urges him
Witted with and whored
Settler named and crushed grim promise
Duchess were more spectacula
This became but suspicion, as John sipped his followers.


We’ve sold literally thousands of our world famous Redneck Beer Gift Baskets, and there seems to be no end in sight to how many we will be sending out. We also send them out to unsuspecting victims, I mean, people who really deserve them, as a gift for just being so cool.The next beer gift basket we send will be addressed to JD at I Do Things.

JD deserves gifts just for making us laugh so many times. I snickered for a good two days over her post, I Am Famous (and More!), where we learned of her deep seated desire to squeeze plump birds. Bird squeezers everywhere can thank JD for coming out of the closet on this taboo subject.

What else do we know about JD? Well, we can get a glimpse of her personal life in  I Like Porn So You Don’t Have To. She also loves the marshmallow pieces in Lucky Charms, so much so that she removes some of the regular cereal to increase the marshmallow to cereal ratio. Tell me if that isn’t magically delicious!

And we know she sometimes has “nude beach adventures”after reading I Went To The Ponderosa Sun Club. In fact, if you only read one thing at I Do Things, you have to read about their naked visit to the snack bar at the Poderosa club! I laughed so hard I couldn’t breath properly for minutes. If you are at all interested in the nude lifestyle but are afraid to try it, JD might be your window into a brave new world. One thing I know for sure, I will never run into JD (or anyone else!) on a nude beach. I am quite happy letting her do the nude beach thing for me.

There is so much more at I Do Things, that you will just have to head over there and find out yourself. I don’t think you will be disappointed.

For JD’s beer gift , we are going all out. We will have most of the items we listed in The Ultimate Redneck  Gift Basket, and a few more. Since JD just lurves cherries, we thought we’d put a few of those in there. We also put a couple Canadian Maples as well as a dozen red velvet cupcakes in the basket. And of course, Blue Beaver Beer. When you’re feeling blue, grab a beaver!

Thanks for the laughs, JD.

I have been suffering in the clutches of this horrible situation for months. I didn’t know which way to turn, lost in indecision and fear. Was I the only person on Earth with this problem? I didn’t think so, but I was afraid to ask. I just tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t go away.
Every time I logged in, there it was. Letters in bold proclaimed the horrid news : “Your WordPress installation is incredibly old, useless and outdated. You must upgrade now! Upgrading is more important than the lives of your family members. We can’t tell you what will happen to you if you don’t upgrade, but it’ll be bad. You won’t feel secure ever again unless you upgrade to the newest version. Upgrade now, or Die!”

I wanted to upgrade right away, so naturally I went to check out the instructions at WordPress. I read them over and over and felt pretty stupid because I barely understood a word of it! It sounded like I needed to make a backup copy of My SQuirreL Database, whatever that was. I didn’t even know my blog was squirreling away files like that! It was too scary, so I tried to forget about it.

But everywhere I looked, someone was flaunting their newer version of WordPress. “Look at my blog!” they would exclaim. “It is much more shiny than yours and all the security leaks are plugged! I am so happy and up to date, I could just Twitter all day!” I just grumbled inside and turned my back on these keep up with the Joneses smartass genius bloggers.

Months went by, and no one hacked this blog through one of these so called security leaks. I knew that it was only a matter of time before someone pointed at our antique coding and laughed, though. I was ashamed to use my WordPress at the mall for fear of public humiliation.

Eventually, I wanted to use a plugin that wasn’t compatible with my ancient WordPress dinosaur code. I had to decide to stay medieval or to move into the new era.  I bit the bullet and read the upgrade tutorials over and over until I thought I knew how to backup My SQuirreL’s datatabase and give my files permission to go out and play.

The big moment had arrived. I went ahead and backed up. I deleted files. I uploaded files. I lit incence and made a magic circle on the floor, then chanted arcane words in a long dead forgotten language. I applied the best anti wrinkle cream money could buy. My relief was palpable when I discovered the upgrade worked!

A week went by, and My SQuirreL was happy in his new database. All seemed well. All of my plugins got upgraded. Life went on. And then, suddenly, there was a new message on the dashboard: “WordPress 2.6.2 is available! Please update now.” Arggghh!

Haven’t all these people heard, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?