Category — LS Blogs News/Updates

One of the frequent tasks carried out here at LS Blogs is going through the queue removing unsuitable entries, or correcting mistakes in some cases.

Today, I found one entry that really put a smile on my face.

It was for a manual blog submission service, the type where you pay a company and they submit your blog to directories.

Well, you would assume that if they are submitting to directories for a living, they would be able to do a great job of their own submission for their own site.

Well, apparently not….

The description was as follows.

[NAME REMOVED FOR PRIVACY PURPOSES] Shop offer manual submission of your blog and RSS or Atom Feed to blog web directories, feed search engines, news services and web-based RSS aggregators at affordable price to improve your blog

But the kicker, was the url they entered……

http://Manual Blog Submission Service

Yes, you read that correctly they actually did put in

“http://Manual Blog Submission”

as the web address for their own site.

They must have realised their mistake afterwards so they submitted it again, with the correct url in this time.

But needless to say, BOTH submissions were in the wrong category completely - they did not even look for the right category to submit them into….

These people take other peoples money to submit to directories, and they cant even get put their own URL in correctly. Scary….

Needless to say, it went in the bin, along with the a couple of hundred of other bad submissions I found when looking today.

Some people go to great lengths to try to get in *multiple* submissions that are all pure spam, they must spend quite some time, but its all wasted when the delete and ban button gets pressed - and it also means that if they did submit a genuine entry along with the rest of the spam, they all go, even the genuine one…

I have been testing out a newer version of the bot that indexes all the feeds for the blogs listed in the directory, its taking some time to go through and iron out the problems, but it is proving worthwile.

It is throwing up a message each time a bad feed is found, which is enabling me to go and manually check that blog for a correct feed.

Many of the blogs have been parked, or changed to ‘invitation only’ or have been removed - so I have had a great clean up of the directory at the same time!

But as the dead ones are removed, many, many more feeds have been corrected, and are now being pulled in and indexed by the the blog directory.

I have to offer a apology to a few people at this time also, due to one of the tweaks made, the site started sending out the acceptance emails to some people when I was manually checking the blogs, and ‘re-accepting’ them with the corrected details.

This has now been corrected, sorry if you got a second acceptance email, you can ignore it!

After getting to the 8.5 thousand mark (the siteid) I need a little break so will resume checking the rest at a later time.

Finally, LS Blogs would like to wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.

All the best!

The search facility on LS Blogs has now been improved again, this improvement makes the search
a lot more useable. It is now returning results more often, and makes finding blogs, or content in blogs much easier than before.

This is just one of many improvements that will be implemented over time, hope you like it - it certainly seems to be working better for me when I use the search features.

Special thanks go to Ray who runs a eco friendly printing firm also does the eco friendly alocalprinter.com blog for his recent forum posting about the latest addition to google’s webmaster tools.

I would have missed that one for quite a while, what with christmas coming up

Anyways, I tried out the new features (google reporting issues with meta tags) and found that I did have some issues on site, and fingers crossed - they are now sorted out

They will need more work, as you can imagine with a large site like this with many tens of thousands of pages, there will be scope for improvement!

So, don’t forget if you have your site verified with google to pop over to your webmaster tools to see the new additions.

I have manually cleaned out the link rot from the SEO/SEM category, thankfully the category was fairly clean, but it is a few pages shorter now due to dead blogs or never updated blogs being removed. A few were moved to more appropriate categories and some were updated as they had moved to new URL’s.

Also done a little change to the doctype, and the html to fix a couple of minor problems but that should not affect users of the site, other than making some foreign blogs easier to read on screen.

Queue is now at 5301 blogs..

I have not really spent much time yet on the search results, improving them has been on the ‘to-do’ list for quite a long time now, as they were returning many duplicate results.

I am experimenting (and learning) with the search feature at the moment, I have imlemented the first test, which seems a big improvement over the previous code, its no longer listing pages full of duplicate results now.

I will be tweaking the code as time permits, to further improve it.

The submission queue is now just under 5800 blogs, I have managed to remove many more dead blogs from the directory, and cleaned up a load of blogs that were never updated for a long time.

The old pagination was not scaling up very well in many categories (due to the amount of entries in them), it was simply showing page 1,2,3,4 right up to page 100 or more in a long line at the bottom of the screen.

I have rewritten it so it now shows First, Previous, Next and Last along with the a snipped selection of relevant page numbers.

It should make the navigation of the categories easier.

I have just done this on the pages that browse the categories for now, as long as it works fine for a while I will implement the same code in the search pages also.

Im still working slowly through sending out the newsletter previously mentioned, its not really a ‘newsletter’ as such, just a quick summary of a few things, and a little news, not a full blown marketing job so to speak

Only sent out a couple of thousand(ish) so far, had a couple more opt-outs, but also had some valuable feedback about a couple of minor problems which I have corrected and a few people have popped in to update the blog descriptions, urls or keywords.

Yesterday I sent out the first batch of ‘news’ as a newsletter mass email to a batch of users,
it is *very* rare (in fact I think this is the first *mass* mailing done so far by the directory), so it was a learning experience for me.

I had a couple of replies, a couple of ‘opt me out’ replies, and even a thank you for the news from one person

One interesting thing that came to light is the login code was not working, I checked into it and well, they are right - I have no idea what happened, but the login code has been overwritten.

I need to figure out what caused that, then fix it, so the login code is down till I sort that out, but that should be done fairly soon.

I also found out there is a daily limit on the emails I can send on this server, which explains why they suddenly stopped sending… I think I will have to ask to have that limit increased, just in case I ever do need to do a mass email in a emergency (unlikely, but I would like the opportunity to be able to do so, just in case…)

As well as continuing with the previously mentioned tasks, I am now cleaning up the data on the more details pages.

Several hundred incorrect feeds have been removed (automated) and around the same number have been either deleted or moved by hand where the automated tool didnt spot them.

Again, I am using this as a learning experience, and slowly building up the toolset to keep the directory clean.

Still a long way to go, can only handle so many in one day, but already its taking less time to read the new posts and update the database, as its not having to trawl through as many dead entries now.

I also noticed quite a few blogs had been using the ’submission url’ field (meant for sites such as blog directories or blog hosts to put in their add url or create blog url etc) as a spam link to their other blogs, or sites. Those are being deleted, not automated yet, but will be soon (for most of them).

As always there will be ones that need to be hand checked, and I am also thinking of keeping an eye on who is abusing the system like this, and booting the persistant offenders, along with their submissions.

Obviously Im not talking about the odd mistake, or wrong entry now and again, but the people who submit many, many blogs, and are trying to game the system (some so called professional SEO companies, who usually cant even get their own URL right are the worst offenders, no offence to any genuine SEO companies, but their are some right cowboys out in the world….)

I have temporarily turned off the forum, due to the amount of spammers signing up (and not posting!)

It appears they were doing it for the link in their profile, which was pointless, as I removed them all a while ago, but spammers are a little stupid….

I will leave it disable for a while, they may give up. In the meantime, I think I will look into just deleting the existing forum, installing a brand new version, and integrating it so only people with accepted blogs can post, that means the memberlist would consist of people already in lsblogs, no more dual sign up required.

I have a few ideas, well loads actually, its just finding time to do any of them!