Unfortunately, the recent Google Search algorithm (PANDA update) seems to give more importance to these splogs rather than the original site. I’ve seen many instances where our site was being outranked by the content scrappers in Google search, this makes me sad and is pretty bothersome. A small example of this can be seen below:

As you can see in above screenshot, the scrapper site is ranking at 1st position whereas the original site is at 3rd position. This definitely drops down our organic traffic and the sploggers who just steal our work enjoy the benefit of it.

To combat against this, Google seems to have finally started working to improve their search algorithm and they need data points for testing. Matt Cutts (head of the Google webspam team) just tweeted a link, using which site owners can report about blog scrapers to Google. This is a specialised webpage to Report scraper pages, it says:

Google is testing algorithmic changes for scraper sites (especially blog scrapers). We are asking for examples, and may use data you submit to test and improve our algorithms.

From now onwards, if you ever find any spam site or blog who is lifting your articles and is ranking above your site in Google, then do report about them and help Google in improving their algorithm. For me, Panda is a sort of nightmare that has turned into reality, resulting in 50% drop in both traffic and revenue since last few months.

To Report a Scraper site, just visit here. Input the search query, then URL of original site page and the scrapper site page. You can share some details too. Click Submit!

Note: This form does not perform a spam report or notice of copyright infringement.Related Posts:

• Check if Google’s new Algorithm has affected your Site’s Organic Traffic
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This is usually the case with Spam Blogs who blindly copy your content and link directly to your site images. Let’s say you published an informative article, then there is a good chance that it might get scrapped by numerous content scrappers as was happened in my case. To prevent this, you must Enable Hotlink Protection for your blog or website and stop everyone else from hotlinking your site images and videos.

How to Stop Hotlinking using cPanel -

We’re sharing the easiest method to do this task, provided your site has cPanel and you have access to it. Follow the steps below:

1. Login to cPanel.

2. Select “HotLink Protection” from Security window in cPanel.

3. Click on the ‘Enable’ button to enable hotlink protection.

4. Now enter the desired URLs/website to whom you want to allow access. Make sure to enter your site domain here as well as the list of feed readers like Feedburner, Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. so they don’t display the redirect image on your site and feeds.

ADD all the domains listed in image below (replace webtrickz.com with your domain).

5. Specify the file extensions you wish to block. (Default are jpg, jpeg, gif, png, bmp)

6. Input the URL of any image (should NOT be hosted on your site) which you like to serve as the Redirect image on sites who have hotlinked your images. Below is an example of our redirect image hosted on Imageshack.

Then click ‘Submit’ and you’re done. Now visit any site who is directly linking to your site images. They must show the redirect image. In my case above image is shown, visit (goo.gl/2SmKN , goo.gl/j6cSK) to see the live demo

“Do check your website and feeds properly after making this change to make sure everything is working the right way.”

Thanks +Dhawal Damania and +Amit Banerjee for the hat tip!

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Certainly, our Comments section is bloated with lot of Spam comments listed under Spam section and similarly there are Pending comments. If you want to get rid of all the Spam or Pending comments, then you can easily remove all of them at once in just a few clicks without the need to use the uneasy phpMyAdmin method.

Just install the WP-Optimize plugin directly from your WordPress Dashboard and activate it. To access it, just open the Dashboard drop-down menu and click on the “WP-Optimize” option. Now tick mark the desired option ‘Clean marked Spam comments’ or ‘Clean Unapproved comments’ (Pending comments). Click on the Process button.

Voila! All the Spam or Pending/Unapproved comments will get deleted instantly. You can deactivate this plugin later if you don’t want to use it frequently.

Update – I just noticed that we can easily bulk delete all the Spam comments in WordPress without using any plugin. To do so, go to Comments > Spam and click on the “Empty Spam” button. All the spam comments will get deleted.

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This post is just to share a little insight of WebTrickz’s journey in 2010. I started this blog in May, 2008 as just a hobby but after stepping in 2010, I conceived to opt this as a profession. 2010 was truly a good and lucky year for me since beginning in which WebTrickz made prominent and steady growth every month. This always pleased and motivated me to work more harder and smarter.

Below are WebTrickz Traffic Stats for Year 2010 (Jan 2010 – Dec 2010) which will give you a view as how we progressed with time. Includes both Total Visits and Pageviews:

A Total of 800 Posts were made in 2010 on webtrickz, mostly all were written by me.

As far as Revenue is considered, it is pretty good and has made similar growth like our traffic. Below is the Annual Income Report 2010 (AdSense) for WebTrickz but without the actual earnings figure. You can see the growth though

Thanks a lot to all our readers, friends, fellow bloggers, and my family for their love & support. This all couldn’t have been possible without you. I’m looking forward for more perfection, growth, and sharing great articles in 2011. Keep supporting us in future too!

Don’t forget to follow @web_trickz (Official twitter profile of Webtrickz.com)

Again, Happy New Year 2011.

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An exclusive way is discovered by us which will allow you to extract the email addresses, IP address and Name of all commentators from a specific post in WordPress.org.

Follow the step by step tutorial below carefully to extract Email address:

1. Login to cPanel (of your blog host).

2. Go to phpMyAdmin under Databases section.

3. Select your blog database from the left panel which may be marked as _wrdp1

4. Click on wp_comments from table in left hand side.

5. Now click on “Search” tab.

6. Open Options (in blue), Select comment_author, comment_author_email and comment_author_ip in the fields box. Tick mark ‘DISTINCT’ to remove the exactly similar entries (those with same name, email and IP address).

7. Input comment_post_id = xxxx under "Add search conditions (body of the "where" clause):" Replace xxxx with the post ID.

To find Post ID of a post, just login to your blog’s WordPress dashboard. Open ‘Posts’ and point your mouse over the preferred post. You’ll then see a link in the status bar of browser. Just note the no. next to post=xxx (For eg: Here it is 7260) as shown below:

8. Set Number of rows per page to 1000

9. Display order Ascending

10. Click ‘GO’ button. All queries will be sorted now.

11. Click Export button, select ‘CSV for MS Excel’ and tick mark ‘Save as file’. Click GO.

A MS Excel file will now be produced containing all the commentators name, IP and email address from a certain post. You can then find duplicate email and IP addresses and sort the invalid ones using Excel. Then you can copy all the email addresses and use Random.org to draw the giveaway winners.

This guide looks difficult in starting but you’ll find it really easy, once you get used to it. This post is specially for bloggers who conduct big giveaways on their blog.

Do share this tutorial if you find it useful.

Update – Sandip of BlogsDNA has provided us a source code which eliminates 6 steps and makes it real easy to do this task. Check below how to do it:

Go to phpMyAdmin and select your blog database. Now click on “SQL” tab. Input the below SQL query there and click the ‘Go’ button. You’ll now come straight to Step 11.

SELECT DISTINCT comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_IP
FROM (
SELECT DISTINCT comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_IP
FROM wp_comments
WHERE `comment_post_ID` = ‘xxxx’
) AS WEBTRICKZ

Remember to Replace xxxx with your Post ID.

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QuickInstall is a HostGator designed auto installer, similar to Fantastico, that allows you to install common scripts in just a few clicks! All programming for QuickInstall and the software library for QuickInstall is in house, which means faster updates and more flexibility. Most functionality is in place, but there may be bugs.

With QuickInstall, webmasters with shared, VPS and dedicated hosting on Hostgator can simply install all the common scripts. These mainly include: Blogging software like WordPress, Commerce software, Content Management software (Joomla, Drupal, MODx, etc.), Forum software (phpBB, bbPress), and many other software & scripts.

For example: When WordPress 3.0 was released, it was updated and ready to be installed in our software library within a few hours compared to days with Fantastico.  No longer do you have to wait weeks to get the latest versions, with QuickInstall you will have almost instant updates available at your fingertips!

To use QuickInstall, just login to your cPanel and click the ‘QuickInstall’ icon located under the Software/Services box.

Note: QuickInstall has been rolled out to HostGator shared servers at this time. If you are on their dedicated servers or have your own VPS at HostGator and want QuickInstall, just submit a ticket at https://tickets.hostgator.com. One of their Administrators will install it for you, free of charge.

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WordPress 3.0 merges MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality. Users will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates and you can upgrade multiple plugins at once with a single click. It allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets, and much more.

See full list of changes in WP 3.0 [Version 3.0]

Download WordPress 3.0 FinalRelated Posts:

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Page Speed – To use it, you need to have Firefox with Firebug add-on installed. Then install the Page Speed add-on. After installing, just open the desired webpage in Firefox and click the firebug button from status bar > open Page Speed tab > and click Analyze Performance button. You’ll then be shown a Page Speed Score of that specific page.

See WebTrickz got a Page speed score of 87/100 which is pretty good.

YSlow – YSlow is a similar free tool from Yahoo which Grades your web pages and suggests ways to improve website speed. To use it, you must have Firefox with Firebug and YSlow add-on installed. Open firebug and tap YSlow tab > Run test to use it.

• Grade based on the performance of the page (you can define your own rule set)
• Summary of the page Components
• Chart with statistics
• Tools for analyzing performance, including Smush.it and JSLint

Webmaster Tools – You can also use Google webmaster tools to see how much time, pages on your site take to load on an average. To analyze this, visit Webmaster Tools Labs > Site Performance and see the Performance overview chart.

>> Hope the above tools can help in improving the speed of your site and provide a faster web experience to your readers.

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