In general, comment spammers write messages to escape your attention. Although they use smart spam bots and BlackHat software like XRumer or ScrapeBox, they want you to believe they are real bloggers, real people, writing real comments. They want you yo approve the comment and publish it on your site. They simply lie in order to convince you to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Web spammers are selling links from your blog to their clients. They do this to game the search engines and trick your readers into visiting dubious web sites. Their clients are sometimes seemingly harmless, but are often peddling fake pills, adult, scams and malware.

Identify False Positive Spam Comments you can first check for links to spammy URLs in the comment url box. Sometimes I’ll see a thoughtful comment clearly written in direct response to the post it’s commenting on, under a real person’s name, and still mark it as spam because they link to a site whose legitimacy is questionable. Another great method I use and that never ever fails is lookup the exact comment or one of it’s sentences in google. Let’s take this sample spam comment:

and paste it exactly in google. Make sure you write it between Quotes (“sample comment”) which tells Google to look for the query in that exact order. If you get any results on the exact comment, it’s most likely comment spam. Now check this:

We received more than 330,000 results. We are talking about 330,000 clones of the same spam comment posted in blogs.

Another consideration is that old posts tend to attract a lot of spam. Real people generally recognize that if a post is a year or so old, the conversation there is pretty much over. Spambots do not realize that. It still sometimes happens that someone comments on an ancient post, but the age of the post is a big red flag.

If you can Identify False Positive Spam Comments, then you can mark them as spam and they will not comment again.

The focus for this release was making WordPress faster and lighter. The first thing you’ll notice when you log in to 3.2 is a refreshed dashboard design that tightens the typography, design, and code behind the admin. If you’re starting a new blog, you’ll also appreciate the fully HTML5 new Twenty Eleven theme, fulfilling our plan to replace the default theme every year. Start writing your first post in our redesigned post editor and venture to the full-screen button in the editing toolbar to enter the new distraction-free writing or zen mode, my personal favorite feature of the release. All of the widgets, menus, buttons, and interface elements fade away to allow you to compose and edit your thoughts in a completely clean environment conducive to writing, but when your mouse strays to the top of the screen your most-used shortcuts are right there where you need them.

Under the hood there have been a number of improvements, not the least of which is the streamlining enabled by our previously announced plan of retiring support for PHP4, older versions of MySQL, and legacy browsers like IE6, which allows us to take advantage of more features enabled by new technologies. The admin bar has a few more shortcuts to your most commonly-used actions. On the comment moderation screen, the new approve & reply feature speeds up your conversation management. You’ll notice in your first update after 3.2 that we’ll only be updating the files that have changed with each new release instead of every file in your WordPress installation, which makes updates significantly faster on all hosting platforms. There are also some fun new theme features shown off by Twenty Eleven, like the ability to have multiple rotating header images to highlight all of your favorite photos.

This new version looks amazing so far. The only problem I found was a message after I updated saying that I was running an old version of explorer (Image above). Quite strange, since I’m using the last version of Internet Explorer.

1) Blog-O-Folio

Blog-O-Folio is a free 2 column WordPress Theme suitable for any and all of your corporate, portfolio or personal blog needs. With a wide variety of tunable theme options and functionality to merge your portfolio with the blog, it is now ultra easy to maintain your blog and portfolio at the same time.

Download Here

2) Liquorice

A simple and clean vintage looking theme for you to build on using Google’s font API Lobster font. Custom background feature enabled.

Download Here

3) Agency

It is a magazine style theme that puts your content in a beautiful wrapper, complete with subtle page elements that is sure to add elegance to your pages.

Download Here

4) Adventure Journal

Adventure Journal is a powerful theme that lets you customize a wide variety of features from the comfort of your Dashboard – no coding required.

Download Here

Siobhan on WPMU.org has a nicely illustrated, researched and explained article on why users should never search for “Free WordPress Themes” in Google or any other search engine. Not enough can be said to avoid the malicious theme hawkers on the Internet and I appreciate the work and the explanation.

The problem is that most users, who are new to the ways of WordPress, will still use Google to search for themes and will download the first link that provides them with a free theme that catches their fancy. I would go so far as to say that somewhat knowledgeable users might still be tempted to ignore any possible bad effects from these themes; e.g. users continue to flock to sites that provide collections of serial numbers online in spite of being riddled with porn and adware. My opinion is that there are two ways to solve the problem or at least throttle down the preponderance of malicious themes installed on hapless WordPress blogs. Both options come with their pros and cons but one is a resolution closer to home.

Read More Here…

Google Search submission URL. Submit here if your site is new and/or still not listed in google. How to know if your site is listed in Google?

Just go to Google and type this in Google Search -> site:your-url.com

1) Google Search submission URL:

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

2) Google Blog Search:

Make sure you submit here, because if your site is listed in Google, it doesn’t mean it is listed in the blog search. High quality and when you make a new high quality post, you can also get listed in the top 10 in Google, at the bottom, where it says: “Blog posts about…”

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping

3) Bing Search:

Bing was originally known as MSN Search. Microsoft’s official search engine that is here to stay.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

4) Yahoo Site Explorer:

You can submit a webpage or a Site Feed. They can ask you to verify your submission by adding a META tag to your home page, or uploading a verification file to your site. It’s worth it to submit there and take a few minutes to verify it.

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

5) Yahoo RSS submission:

Another great tool from Yahoo to submit your RSS, very useful.

http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/submit

Make sure you follow me on Twitter for more great tips.

Happy WordPressing everyone!

           Download Theme

               Demo Theme

I designed this template in Photoshop, coded and edited it in Dreamweaver and Notepad++. Although this theme is visual attractive (which in many cases means “heavy”) it does not take a lot of resources like some other similar wordpress themes. Most of the visual attractive themes tend to be heavy for your host and slow loading for the user. Most of those themes load a lot of add-ons in their header.php, plus they have a very complex functions.php. I designed Director to be as “lite” as possible, yet visual attractive.

Many more features will be added in the next versions of Director. Some extra features like custom CSS, Analytics, Adsense and more. Custom CSS will let you modify the stylesheet and save the customization, so you don’t lose the changes when you update. Twitter, Facebook and Custom RSS can be added from the theme’s options. Enter the WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance -> Director Options. You can also send suggestions here. This WordPress theme will be offered in Spanish (my native language) in the next few versions. Want to translate Director Theme to another language? You can contact me as well and I will add your credit (name and site) to the changelog!

Here are some stats of WpThemesPlanet first year:

20,000 downloads of Patagonia and 10,000 of Tandil

100 articles

800 approved comments

12,000 spam comments blocked by Akismet!

300 user Emails received.

450 Support emails sent.

3 Free WordPress Themes and 50 Theme Updates released.

Many theme customizations for clients of Patagonia and Tandil.

I want to thank everyone for using my themes and supporting the project. The first year is hard. Most internet projects collapse during this period. If you manage to survive the first year, you are good to go. During this period, I spent time adding content and supporting users, as well as updating and improving both themes. During the second year I want to take the whole project to the next level. Many good things will follow! Stay tuned!

Finally I want to quote a phrase from Thomas Alva Edison:

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Never give up!

By late 2001, Google was well on their way to claiming a dominant position in the search market, and everyone was looking for links. Because of the “link building arms race” that Google started back then, link building has changed a lot since 2001. Link building has become a discipline unto itself, and one short chapter isn’t enough. Bing has also been using a similar concept since 2009.

The first step in understanding link building is getting a sense of how the search engines see things. As explained in a previous article, all of the search engines use link analysis to help them determine page rankings and choose relevant pages.

There are only a few areas where the search engines are actively working to fight what they call “webspam” and link analysis is by far the most active subject in that area. As a result, it’s very important for you to understand their position, and what they’re looking for, if you want to create an intelligent link building strategy for your site and stay alive.

There are a number of ways to look at any given link that you find on the web. From your perspective as the webmaster trying to get ranked, it might seem that the only important questions are: What page does this link point to? What words are used in the text? How much “link juice” am I going to get from this link? Is there any risk of being penalized?

In order to understand the answers, you need to understand the questions, and that means starting with the search engines’ perspective. So, make sure to check and analyze the sites you exchange links with.