I just got done busting my butt trying to add nofollow links to the comments section on one of my social bookmarking sites.

I was getting a lot of link spam and although I could have deleted the comments, I didn’t really want to. So I had to get creative.

Ok, actually I looked around until I found some pieces of javascript code that did what I wanted it to. I had to take three js functions and hook them up together.

In the end no matter what link the user enters in the comments section it will always have the infamous rel=nofollow attached to it.

I know a lot of people don’t like this tag cause it can hose them in their efforts to get good links. But most of those people are the guys sporting some link spam. The old rule still applies. If you have good content and offer something of value you will get a link of value in return. More links = more PR. Just look at Microsoft’s web site (PR 9)! They offer lots of value don’t they? Well, that depends on who you are. Alright, I confess I use XP at work too. But I don’t like it so there!

The real reason I added this to the site was because my page rank dropped from a 6 to a 4, then down to a 2, then 0. FRICKIN ZERO. That’s horse piss! I have excellent internally linking on this site. I have close to 45,000 internal links. Well, dang it hang on I’ll go check to make sure.

Ok, 85,162 pages indexed at yahoo. Only half that at Google -which is still good by comparison. They say if you can get 10%-25% of your content indexed by Google you’re doing good. I’ve got 47,640 inlinks. Now that includes all links. Breaking it down its like: 2,670 incoming links and 44,970 internal links. Not so much on the incoming links. I have to work on that.

So back to my original point. With such sweet internal linking structure I was holding my PR nice at a 6. But then it started dropping off, I didn’t think much of it, but it got worse. I added some nofollow links on the outbound links, but I forgot about the comments.

I login to MySql and check it out -just to see how many I have. I don’t remember the exact count and I don’t feel like opening it back up to check. But it was about 15,000 or so -aw heck I’ll go look dang it. Hang on. Total comment count is 15,150 BooYa! What a memory. haha. So yeah, after closer inspection there where like 85% of the comments had links in them. Hmm, so let me do the math. (carry the one…..) Ok, that’s like 12,877.5 outbound links. Wait did I just write a half link? Dang, that would be cool. Anyway… So duh moron. Yeah, no wonder I lost all my freakin PR. Stupid poser link spammers. Not any more though.

Lesson learned. Money lost, lot of money lost. I sell links, and with a higher PR I could have been banking more green. Dang It!!!

Not sure if you guys know this or not. You probably do because the editor that comes with the default install of wordpress blows. Try FckEditor. It’s been around a while and can be used directly in your code with almost any programming language. I’ve used it for PHP and ColdFusion. In fact the ColdFusion guys over at Adobe like it so much they included it with the latest version of CF8.

I always had to go into Wordpress and take off the visual editor because it always hosed up my code and other formatting. With FckEditor its a breeze to copy and paste articles, if that’s what you’re doing -PRL Blog . Or for me I just needed it to format my posts better. Ok, so I was doing some PLR stuff -so what.

For those that don’t know about FckEditor you can full screen the editor while you’re typing so it’s almost like using MS Word. Kinda cool. Oh, yeah and if you need to tweak the source you can always do so, with that freakin huge ‘SOURCE’ button at the top right of FckEditor.

So get it and use it. It helps and makes blogging a little less painfull.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on SEO. My knowledge with SEO is ok enough to get a site to a number one rank for certain keywords with no competition. But with competition I suck. In fact I didn’t know how bad I sucked until I started reading the real-life account of professional SEO marketer.

There are many things that I have read that I want to try, but for the most part I am still trying to process all the articles I’ve read.

In fact the process behind building a website and marketing it for myself was all wrong. Most people build a site and then market it via SEO, article marketing, link exchanges or on the rare occassion they’ll use PPC if they are moderately good at PPC. And when I say moderately good at PPC I mean they at least break even over a given month, plus a little extra.

Anyway, I’ll talk more later about what I am doing. I’ve got to go. My kid is in the tub and I have to get him out before he craps in it.

If you’re looking to get into Affiliate Marketing you really need to be a member of Wicked Fire. The members there are very knowledgeable and they know what they are doing.

I read a post where one guy was upset because he was only making $1,000 – $2,000 a day compared to a guy that was making $23,000 a day.

Myself, I’m still too much of a chicken to get into AM with PPC. It takes a while to get up to speed and learn everything from what I have read. You need to spend enough time in it to fail and learn from your mistakes to get the feel of it and to know what works and what processes you need to take.

But if you have the cash and can stomach it, it will definitely pay in the long run. A friend of mine is pursuing it and he is already making a profit of triple digits after his 3rd or 4th week. Not a lot, but not bad either.

There seems to be something wrong with this theme. I uploaded a post yesterday about a Coming Soon Ajax interface and put it up so people could download it, but you can’t even click on it.

I’ve had this problem before. When I use CSS to dynamically position stuff, some of the other CSS borders can overlap different elements of the page. I will have to do some checking and see if I can diagnose exactly why this is happening.

Anyway, in a couple days as I post more, the download link for the “Coming Soon app” will be clickable.

(update 6/02/09: the bug has been fixed. It was what I suspected. Some CSS settings incorrect. It was causing different elements to overlap which prevented the links from working on the first post.)