Wordpress features a plug-in known has Akismet, which filters out unwanted comments. There are programs running loose in the wild whose sole purpose is to inject comments into blogs that link to other websites. The mentioned plug-in filters out the unwanted comments, spam, from wanted human comments, referred to as ham.
A useful article here which provides additional tactics for removing unwanted traffic. However, one of their tactics to thwart unwanted traffic removes the ability to schedule future blog posts in Wordpress should your server’s ip address change, as scheduled post will never publish when their scheduled time arrives. Manually running wp-cron.php didn’t publish the overdue posts. I tracked down the problem to the following htaccess rule.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^72\.47\.224\.86$
RewriteRule ^(.*) - [F]
The above rewrite condition prohibits traffic from sources that don’t use a web browser unless it originates from the web server. The web server’s ip address is hard-wired in the rule. This works fine unless your web server’s ip address changes, and this is what happened with my web host.
Any scheduled post due for publishing remained forever scheduled. Correcting this problem involves changing the ip address mentioned in the above rewrite rule to the server’s current ip address or remove the rewrite rule entirely, relying solely on Akismet to filter the spam that unwanted traffic may leave.
One of the first useful things after creating a blog is to make Google aware of the blog’s existence. Blog software platforms such as Wordpress.com provides ways of blasting blog postings into Cyberspace, but there’s nothing like sending your information straight to the almighty search engine. Google provides a service called as Webmaster Tools which shows you which words people search for to arrive to your site, and more importantly it makes the search engine aware that your site exists.
In this example, I’ll demonstrate how I’ll make Google aware that joebivins.com exists. I’ll speak strictly in terms of Wordpress.com blogs since that is where joebivins.com is hosted from.
First, navigate to Webmaster Tools and at the Dashboard type in the name of your site. Click on the Add Site button.
Since you can only add websites that belong to you, you will have to verify that you actually own the site. It’ll request that you add a specifically named file to your website.
Wordpress.com is restrictive as what you can upload and do in its system. You can’t create specific meta information in HTML pages or upload HTML pages. What I can do is from the Wordpress Dashboard is select Write, Page, and give the new page a title of google9a5d0dfd94f81751.html. In your case the title of the page will be different as Webmaster Tools generates a different file name each time.
If you make the page private, Google will not be able to find it and can’t determine if the site is yours. Publish the page.
Return to the Verify a Site page on the Webmaster Tools Dashboard. Click on the verify button.
Now that the search engine knows of the site’s existence, there is one other thing that we can do. Blogs come equipped with an RSS feed, displaying the first 10 or so most recent postings. Providing an RSS feed to the search engine causes postings from your site to appear in search results faster.
At the Webmaster Tools Dashboard, there is a Sitemap column. Sitemaps, provide a basic skeleton of your website, allowing the search engine to easily navigate it. Click on the Add link corresponding to your blog. In the picture below, I’ll click on the Add link that corresponds to joebivins.com.
Wordpress.com RSS feeds take the form of http://yousite.com/feed, where yousite.com is the name of your blog. In the case of joebivins.com, the RSS feed is http://joebivins.com/feed.
In the Add Sitemap dialog, I’ll enter the word feed into the text text field on step 3 shown below. Click on the Add General Web Sitemap.
…add success!
However, there’s one small problem. The page that you created to verify site ownership is own appearing as a page on your blog.
To remove it, we’ll need to get the page id. Go to Manage, Pages, and mouse over the title of your page. The id will display on the status bar of your Internet browser.
In the picture above, the URL ending in post=17 displayed on the status bar indicates that the id of the verification page is 17. From the Wordpress Dashboard go to Design, Widgets. If Pages are listed under the Current Widgets, click on the Edit link to the right of the word Pages.
In the Exclude field type the name of the verification page id, which in my case is 17. Click Change. Click Save Changes.