7 Ways To Evaluate Blog Post Quality — Tuning your BS detector

October 22, 2009 By 10 Comments

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

Would you recognize a bogus blog post if it bit you on the butt?

While some blog posts are obviously bogus, for others, the bogosity is not quite so obvious.

I was recently doing a bit of due diligence on SEO for Website In A Weekend readers, and it occurred to me that most of what I was reading about SEO was not very good. As in, essentially useless, which is to say, bogus.

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I hate bogus blogs.

It turns out I have a sideline career as an occasional reviewer for a couple of academic journals, so my BS detector is fairly well tuned.

Here are some of the indications I find when content has little or no value:

  1. Rehashed content. The same old, same old. Over and over again. On the one hand, it’s reaffirming to read and reread (ad infinitum) “what we know is true.” On the other hand, that’s a not a good way to solve problems and make progress. Check for actionable content, if you can’t find any, it’s not worth saving or bookmarking.
  2. Inapplicable content. You click through to some page, and the title of the article bears little or no relationship to the text of the article. Bogus!
  3. Written anonymously. Private Label Rights material on SEO. You can buy the same article everyone purchased. Post it under your name (or make up a fake name), just like everyone else does. Bogus!
  4. Irrelevant content. Does the subject of the article really apply to your business or interest. For example, do you really need to care that much about SEO? You might not. It depends on your goals.
  5. Zero human interest. Really strong articles will have a human voice. You will hear it. Bogus articles read like they were written by machine. In fact, sometimes articles are auto-generated, purely to game search engine results! The yield on these cannot be very high.

    Human interest serves a couple more purposes: 1. helps you track down content thieves, and 2. helps you connect with readers. Your little stories (ok, my stories) might be boring and pedantic, but a machine isn’t clever enough to achieve boringness.

    This article was actually motivated when I was doing some research on some topic (I forget now), and kept running into machine generated-pages. I refuse to link to any of these pages, even as example, but in the future, I’ll update this article and comment on a screenshot.

  6. Stuffed with keywords. These articles can be hilarious, keywords and phrases bolded, emphasized and repeated ad nauseum all through the article. If Google doesn’t have a keyword ratio, they should. Something #keywords/#words total. Anything over a certain value would be considered stuffed. Send me an article if you see one of these, I’ll compute the ratio.

    These aren’t that hard to find either. Just do a search on a hot topic. You will be lucky if half the top page of search results is useful information.

  7. Weak comments: no comments, poor comments, bogus comments, and no author response in comments. It’s amusing to see articles with 15-20 one line comments along the lines of “Nice post!” or “Very useful information, thank you.” Perhaps some of these are real. Almost surely not all of them are.

    Smashing Magazine may be an exception here. Smashing doesn’t allow URL linking, and runs a pretty stripped down commenting system: name and email only. The last couple of articles I read had quite a few comments, but they were pretty weak comments overall. Worth watching though.

The obvious (to me) current example of all of the above is the SEO thing: a big space filled with little content. Plus, “black hat” SEO can game up almost any article like the above conditions into a very high ranking on search engines. You’ve surely seen all the above.

Here’s what you can do to add quality signal and reduce the noise:

  1. Specifically link to quality pages. Don’t worry about losing your “juice.” If the linked page is high quality it will benefit your readers.
  2. Do not link to low quality pages at all.
  3. For the long term, be careful about accepting links in from garbage pages. I generally refuse trackbacks to page having no information. That is, I do, when I catch it. Some slip through.
  4. Link to people, real people, not “websites.” For example, I have linked out to Sean, Holly, Jan and Extreme John. And Larry too. These are real people, not just websites.

    I’ve linked out many others here, and will continue to do so. You’ll meet more of these folks in the future. In the meantime, introduce some of your audience!

I’m really sure that many of these bogus websites and blogs -for now – get more traffic than Website In A Weekend. I’m also really sure that none of them will ever develop a real, live audience of human beings.


In the long term, it’s the people that make the difference.

Can you add to this list of bogus detectors? Please do, I’m sure I missed a few things.

[Update November 6, 2009]

From The Freelance Writing Jobs Network, 10 Tips for Telling if an Article Contains Reliable Information:

Bad content floods the web. It’s so bad that schools are giving out guidelines for sites to avoid when collecting information for reports. Many writers also use the web to research information, but how can we know if it’s someone else’s unreliable content rewritten ten times, or if it’s a realistic investigation or expose?

Filed Under: Creating Content Tagged With: , , ,

The WordPress Akismet Plugin: Configuration, advantages, disadvantages

August 7, 2009 By 2 Comments

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

Ok, so this post is the result of an accident. I meant to take a screenshot of Google Analytics setup. But I didn’t. I took a screenshot of Akismet configuration instead.

So I decided to use this Akismet image later (which is now), for something else… to wit, this article on Akismet.

Configuring Akismet is about as simple as anything you could ever do on the web:

  1. If you don’t have one already, Go get an account on WordPress.com
  2. After you get an account, you will get an API key. Copy that key into the form as shown below.
Akismet configuration is really simple

Akismet configuration is really simple

You’re done.

So what is Akismet and why does it ship with every installation of WordPress anyway? And why yet another post on Akismet.

Great questions!

I’ll answer the last question first: do a Google search on Akismet. See how many results you get dated 2009. I didn’t get too many myself. Mostly articles dated from 2006-2007 time frame. That’s a veritable epoch in internet terms! So it’s time for an up-to-date article on Akismet.

What is Akismet plugin

The WordPress Akismet plugin is an excellent choice for your first line of defense against comment spam.

Akismet evaluates all the comments people leave on your WordPress blog by tapping a database of known spammers. Pop on over to Akismet.com for a moment, then head back here to get the rest of the story. As you can see, there isn’t much on the Akismet website itself. If you found the Akismet blog, there is considerably more information buried in past posts (and the blog is worth subscribing to as well).

Advantages of using Akismet

Akismet ships with every copy of WordPress as a default plugin, which is extraordinary clever marketing on Automattic’s part. As stated above, you don’t have to do very much to use it.

One of the biggest benefits of using Akismet is that it’s an Automattic product. As such, it has a an enormous amount of momentum riding along with WordPress. While there’s no guarantee Automattic will continue to develop Akismet and give it away, they do use it internally. Since fighting spam is very much an arms race, it seems a good bet the plugin will continue to be developed as well.

But the biggest benefit of all is that Akismet pounds the crap out of spam! Once you’ve been open for comments a few months, you’ll get a real warm and fuzzy feeling seeing all the spam Akismet has caught.

What are the disadvantages of using Akismet?

The primary disadvantage of using Akismet is that it’s totally controlled by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. If they decide to boot you off, you’re gone! This is a pretty low risk though, low enough I’ve never heard of it happening… but read the terms of service very carefully just in case.

If Akismet, for whatever reason, isn’t a good match for you, there are other services and other ways to protect yourself against comment spam, so your risk is pretty small.

Operationally, Akismet isn’t perfect, and you will get a few false positives and missed spam.

False positives: Sometimes, Akismet files as spam comments which are NOT spam. Typically, these are comments along the lines of “Great post!” Here’s the deal on that: If you’re a commenter, ensure your comments add to the conversation. “Great post!” doesn’t really add anything. Send an email via a contact form if your so inspired but can’t be bothered to write something that contributes. On the other hand, if you’re running a blog, at some point you may tire of examining the spam queue for false positives. I know I did. Now I just delete everything in the spam queue. I’ve probably caught a couple of legitimate comments there. I’ll take the hit. Unfortunately, this punishes the legitimate commenter as well. There’s no easy answer. So when you comment on blog, make the comment relevant and interesting!

Missed spam: Akismet doesn’t catch them all. Every day I get between 20-30 comments in my spam queue, for each site, a number that’s creeping up over time. I used to carefully check each comment, but it became counter-productive: in the last year or so, didn’t find anything so I have stopped checking.

I’ve used Bad Behavior in the past, and it works really well, but it slowed down my website to an unbearable 30 seconds for loading. And that was on the post editing page!

I’m currently using Sven Kubiak’s NoSpamNX plugin, which seems to stopping a considerable amount of spam from bots that Akismet lets through.

Find out more about Akismet

Here’s some useful links:

  • Wikipedia on Akismet. I don’t put too much stock in that note about Akismet blackballing users over differences of opinion. It’s almost certainly not true. Even if it were, it’s simple: don’t criticize Akismet, and switch to a competing service if that bothers you.
  • A great article by Rich Boakes from 2005 entitled “Akismet – Comment Spam Killer.” At Automattic’s invitation, Rich was one of the first people to evaluate the Akismet service, and he reported 1 false positive in 517 responses. That’s pretty good just starting out. You should read this article carefully and pay special attention to the pie chart showing the comment percentages.
  • Finally, head on back to Akismet.com, and add the Akismet Blog to your RSS feed.

In closing, Akismet is a great choice as a beginning blogger for your first line of defense against comment spam. Later, if you don’t care for Automattic’s policies, there are competitors to Akismet, but that’s the topic of another article.

Filed Under: Getting Started Tagged With: , , ,