Recently we designed a new site, Maternity Underwear and this was ready really quickly, probably our quickest site design to date. So it was rather frustrating when Google just wasn’t indexing it. Initially we thought it might be the fact that the robots.txt file had incorrectly disallowed access to everything but this was changed and still almost 1 month later the site was being indexed despite it being complete, good content and starting to be linked. Then Gary found that in the new Wordpress and option had changed. Under the Privacy settings the default now appears to be to block search engines and allow normal visitors only. We changed this and about a week later it is starting to be indexed. Hopefully given a bit more time the site will be fully indexed and start to climb and the hard work will pay off. Has anyone else noticed this  option change?

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We noticed that we were getting a lot of spam comments, hundreds a day which uses up time removing them and also bandwidth to our site. So we looked for a plugin to combat this. The simple way we thought was to add a question to the comments section so that spam robots cannot automatically post comments. We came up with the following plugion and so far this seems to be working well for us. If you are having trouble with spam robots hitting your comments, try this plugin.

Math Comment Spam Protection
Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot.

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We are utilising more Wordpress plugins as we get better at webdesign and want to add more functionality to our websites. We thought we’d write a review of the ones we’ve used so far.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. We have seen an influx of spam comments to our site and this plugin has helped get rid of them to the spam folder where we can review them to make sure they are spam.

All in One SEO Pack
This has been a great tool to help get this site to number 1 on google search. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important for websites to improve the amount of hits they get.

Similar Posts
Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. This is very useful to direct readers of your blog to other related content they may be interested in on your site. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.

Social Bookmarks
Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.  You can pick from a large number of social sites which makes this plugin great.

WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. This is useful for determining how much traffic you are getting and what they are doing once they get there.

Wordpress Popular Posts
Retrieves the most active entries of your blog and displays them on a list. As you can see we use this plugin on our sidebar. It means readers can immediately see which are the most popular articles on a site.

WP125
We use this in our sidebar as well to easily manage 125×125 ads within your WordPress Dashboard. It allows you to run ad campaigns for either a specific amount of time or indefinitely.

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This book is a must read if you are new to Wordpress and blogging.
It will help ease the process of setting up your Wordpress blog site.

Wordpress for Dummies is a comprehensive and easy to follow book, which covers everything from Getting started with Wordpress, to Designing your blog site, using Templates and Plugins and also some examples of good templates and plugins.

We created this website using Wordpress and as well as this book we came across Revolution which has some great themes that are easy to use and customize.

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