CAPTCHA and Cutting down Spam on Your Site
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- Are you irritated from never-ending messages to your e-mail account sent by someone you didn’t even know, or are you fed up with advertisement that seems to come up from nowhere to your website? Well, 100% of the people who have their own e-mail address and websites had once suffered or have still been suffering because of spam. Spam can be considered as unsolicited messages sent in your e-mail or unwanted commercial advertisements on your website. Spams are generated by bots, a computer system that randomly sends those useless messages or advertisements to your site.
There are different types of spam. The most common is the message spam in e-mails and the news group and forum spam wherein the spammers post the same comments all over again to different discussions. When you sign in to a suspicious or unsecured website like forums and news group, you give bot programs a chance to obtain your e-mail address and send spam messages. You have to be careful though, as even though some spam look harmless because of their nonsense nature, they are usually actually very harmful to your accounts and computer too.
Nowadays, different websites like Yahoo and Google are using CAPTCHA. It is a program that helps cut down spam on your website and e-mail. “Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, is used to prevent bots from retrieving your e-mail upon the signing up process in a certain website. It works by giving a challenge to someone who wants to gain access by a simple CAPTCHA question or a challenge (might be a simple question or math problem) to ensure that it is generated by a person.
Have you noticed the rumbled letters and unusual words below the sign up or log in form in certain websites? Those are CAPTCHA questions that will ensure that the user who wants to gain access is a human and not a computer. Computers cannot decipher words and images that are distorted, only humans can do. Computer researches have already been working on audio CAPTCHA for visually-impaired persons.
There are tips to prevent spamming in your website. Use a different e-mail address instead of using your personal e-mail address in logging in or signing in an unsecured website. Avoid displaying your personal e-mail in your website. If you need to put an email for contact information in your website, make sure you create one as a webmaster or administrator. Never try buying products from spamming websites because they will just send you tons of e-mails after you buy. If you have a website, make sure you also utilize CAPTCHA or at least require e-mail addresses before letting visitors post their comments in your website. As a webmaster, you have the right to ban spammers within your website. Do not reply in any spam messages. And why not trying a spam-cutting application to remove spam in your website? Most CMS, such as WordPress, also have plugins such as Akismet to filter spam comments.
As we all know, the internet is a very public and dangerous place right now. Privacy can be breached at any time, so keep your online presence and websites protected by all means. Your website is your own home in the WWW, so keep it safe.
Smart YouTube – WordPress Plugin
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- Don’t you just love attaching Youtube videos on your posts or RSS feeds? Videos are actually a big help for different blogs, as people tend to like watching more than reading stuffs. However, the problem with too much videos is that it uses a huge size of your bandwidth and resources, that’s why people drop it off already.
However, with the Smart Youtube plugin, this will no longer be a problem for bloggers and website owners. With this plugin, you can attach not just single videos from Youtube but also playlists in your posts, comments or RSS feeds. Size is not a problem with this plugin, as it is fairly small and integrates with your whole WordPress blog.
Even HD Youtube videos can be attached on posts and can be played back on full screen. It can also make the videos viewable on smartphones, such as the iPhone.
So what is different about Smart Youtube in the traditional Youtube video embedding? The answer lies in the codes. This plugin generates an xHTML code from the embedded video file, so it makes it fairly smaller and easier to load. It also surpasses many compliance issues and validation errors that are main problems with the default HTML code in Youtube.
Again, Youtube videos can be included in RSS feeds via this plugin. So, your subscribers won’t be left out on what you were talking about in the whole post, just because they cannot view the video in their RSS readers. They can even see preview screenshots of the video if their RSS reader does not support Youtube.
This plugin also creates a customizable look for your Youtube videos, such as colored borders to either match or complement your site layout and skin. Even size and position parameters can be fixed via the plugin configuration page.
The only problem with this plugin is that it is only exclusive to Youtube videos, and you have to use other closer plugins which support other video sharing sites like Vimeo if you want to embed videos from there. However, who knows, they might add this feature up the next time?
Overall, this plugin is a great tool for those who care much about videos. No problems with bandwidths, speeds, slowing down of sites, or anything else that could make your visitors leave. It is a lightweight plugin that can even be viewed on your iPhone and other mobile devices.
Check out the Smart YouTube plugin here.
Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- Contact forms in blogs provide useful and beneficial results to blog owners as well as their visitors. As you can see, the easier it takes for people to contact you, the higher the chances that they would feel good to interact with you. One such good contact form in WordPress comes as a plugin – the Contact Form 7.
Obviously, it is a recent improvement of old Contact Form plugins supplied for WordPress. Its purpose is clear, to provide contact form, but this plugin also provides more features than just being a simple way to reach the webmaster.
First of all, this plugin is highly customizable. Its layout can actually be configured to match your overall layout in a simple way. You can put different fields on the form, depending on your preference and needs. You can add data to the drop-down lists on each field. Definitely customized and personalized as you would like it to be!
It can also support file uploads and attachment. Yes, it’s definitely not your ordinary contact form. As we said above, you can add this option depending on what your website data needs. Also, with one plugin, you can add multiple forms with different configurations to different pages and posts to your site. That’s a no-hassle form setup!
Not only that, it also supports Akismet spam filtering, so not everyone can be filling up your forms. CAPTCHA can also be enabled to ensure that a human is filling up the right information and data on the form.
After installing the plugin, attaching the form to a page or wherever in your blog is not a hard thing. You know, it uses just a shortcode for that. The code is just [contact-form 1 "My contact form"] or something like that. So no more complicated codes to copy and paste from one place to another.
Those reasons above actually make this plugin a favorite by most bloggers. Actually without it, contact forms are a tiresome thing to do and it is troublesome to get it configured to receive the right information or else data will be messed up. Its developers are always ready to help the users, so if you ever have a concern or problem with the plugin, you may visit their website in http://contactform7.com. You can also download the plugin via that webpage.
Nonetheless, this plugin is a must-have by each blog, and don’t worry, it’s definitely free to use.
What Is Linking In A Bad Neighborhood?
( The Best Web Hosting Service)- Our primary goal in creating a website is to draw traffic to our site to attract possible customers. Once traffic is drawn to our site, it boosts our ranking in search pages. Spiders from these engines crawl sites that has more webs, so to speak, the more links you have the more chances that your rank will be higher and your top placement in the search engines. But linking to a quality or good website isn’t as simple as that.
Apparently, you can’t just link to any unfamiliar and strange websites. Some website are attracting link by lots of flashy colors, pictures and news. Some even boasts unreal page ranking images. But the real thing is that most of them are only web spammers and link farmers. Those websites only boost themselves with links that are not even related to their topic, spamming thousands of links and backlinks to them.
Most of these sites are banned and penalized by Google (or will eventually get noticed and you will lose all your rankings). One thing that can damage you is that you can also be penalized if you are detected that you are linking with them. The idea is this, if you are linking with people that are dangerous and has a bad reputation, you will also viewed as one of them. But if you are the one that is linked from them and they are spamming your website, you will become more like a victim.
How would you differentiate a good and a bad neighbor? Just like your own community, you are surrounded by your neighbors, and you can see who are bad by looking closely. Bad neighbors are not just classified by spammers and link farmers. They are banned because they are using illegal tactics in controlling the traffic (blackhat methods). They are stuffing keywords, duplicating some contents, violating copyrights, hiding texts and links and other deceiving tactics to boost their ranking. Most of these types of website are plagiarists. They are using copyrighted texts and contents from other websites.
Good neighbors are those who have good reputation, you can look closely to those websites and check if they have the quality to become a link for you (they are authority sites). Be careful in choosing the right one. You can check the pages that are linked to them, see if links from them are linking back. Links are like recommendations, so if they have more quality back links, it is a good neighbor. Give it time to view their source code, to find if they have hidden links in their website.
You can check manually if you like to know if a certain website is a bad neighbor. Using Google, type “site:sample.com”, you will check if sample.com is still a working website. If none appear in your web browser, it only means that it is banned by Google.
Linking to bad neighbors will have a good effect in your ranking at first. But the negative impact to you will be doubled. Google runs regular maintenance and checks rankings constantly. At any point your website is found to be linking in a bad neighborhood, you can also be banned and penalized. That’s why it is better to have natural or what they called organic links, got from honest people who are also looking for good neighbors and network if you want to benefit.
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