Gabe Young

I simply keep all the blog related images on a folder named ‘artwork’. I have one of those for each site.

The importance of PageRank depends on who you ask. IMO, it’s made all the difference for me.

About the my home page PR goes up for my website is usually about the same time when guest writers and advertising offers start rolling in.

I’d rather have a handful of amazing backlinks than a bunch of garbage ones. One of the easier ways to get them is to simply be a guest writer for same niche sites, high traffic, dofollow sites.

No need to contact 435 blogs. Just find a handful of good ones and instead of asking for backlinks, offer to write an article.

I’ve had many guest bloggers over the years and some of them now earn a living from blogging solely.

I can’t speak for everyone else but if you get your PR up, a steady flow of people will come. Obviously, to do it organically, it will take time to get your home page PR to 3 or higher. I’m not a fan of buying backlinks. There may be a hockey stick effect: nothing, nothing, nothing, and boom!

As for plugins I’ve used All in one and Platinum, both are good. You don’t use them to generate keywords for you. Go do some keyword research for what you’re trying to get SERPs for and then use those words in the plugin for the articles.

Regardless, quality content will always be the foundation, whether it’s you writing them or your guests.

BTW, if it matters to you, I’m in the over 15+ years club too.

Approving comments in spam

1. Click on Spam
2. Click checkbox on comments you want to keep
3. Choose Approve (under Bulk Actions)
4. Click Apply

Clearing spam

1. Click Empty Spam

If you bring your own domain to the table, search engines won’t care what tool you used to develop the site, generally speaking.

If you check it under bulk actions, you’ll also have to click the ‘Apply’ button.

I save my articles locally in a large, living Word document. I don’t back up my site since my host does daily backups for the last 30 days.

It’s a simple time savings vs. risk balance decision for me so I choose not to back up my entire site myself.

If you’re in spam and mark a comment ‘not spam’, it doesn’t get published until you go to pending and ‘approve’ it.

WP is easier hands down. I have used Drupal and Joomla and although those are both excellent CMS tools, if you are as new as you claim, WP is definitely the way to go!

Or if you want to spread the word outside of this community, you can always simply look for some of the thought leaders in your niche and just advertise there.

WP is a lot more user friendly than Joomla. Configurations are easy on WP so just about anyone can just pick it up.

I nominate Dub-Ps.

I would recommend the self-host (www.remarpro.com) option. It will cost you about $8/yr for the domain and $80/yr for shared hosting. Unless you want a premium theme, which isn’t necessary, you’re under $100/yr — probably the best money you’ll spend on your business.

It’s quite possible that you got blacklisted, just as you suspected. I would probably remove the post as well since there’s little to lose at this point. If you haven’t done it yet, I would also try to reach out to the vendor to and ask to be removed from those sites.

Not even sure why you would get 1800 backlinks unless they are motivated to charge you more.

At worst, it’s a good lesson learned right? Organic link building is the way to go!