Do you use the “Related Websites” plug-in to automatically link to other relevant websites? If you are, you are most likely killing your blog without even realising it.

The aim of this website is to steer away from writing articles about blogging but some days, the topic is just unavoidable due to the circumstances and the relevancy. At the beginning of April I installed a new plug-in for WordPress called “Related Websites" created by Blog Traffic Exchange that promised to do everything that the Yet-Another-Related-Posts-Plugin (YARPP) plug-in could do, and more besides.

Related Websites would not only do what YARPP could, but also link off-site to other blogs that had relevant content that were part of the Related Websites network. It looked like a win-win situation for everyone concerned, I get relevant links out to other sites and interesting content for my readers, the other blogs get more readers coming their way, and vice versa.

The plug-in requires an activation key and the author has done a reasonable job of keeping out the spammers by only issuing keys after the requesting blog has been verified to be worthy.

There is just one issue with this method, there is nothing stopping someone from setting up one website that looks legitimate, and then replacing it with a spam website after the fact, or even just using stolen content from other websites or spun articles.

I tested the plug-in all through April and May and most of June and in all that time received only five visitors via way of the Related Websites plug-in, none of whom stayed around for anything more than a few seconds. I have also not been happy with the results that the plug-in is returning with regard to my own content in finding related pages in the WordPress database.

For the past two weeks, noting that the traffic exchange was underperforming but also sucking up an awful lot of bandwidth and polluting my statistics with bogus referrers, I thought I would spend several days investigating the results of people linking to me and what sites I was linking out to that had related and relevant content.

And what I found did not please me.

Of the 144 websites I looked at over a one week period that were listed as relevant to whichever article I had written:

• 40 of them could be considered relevant and original content.
• 31 of them used poorly written “keyword rich” spun articles that I also found on other websites
• 28 of them were scraper blogs, taking content from RSS feeds or directly from another website
• 17 of them were unintelligible gibberish
• 16 of them contained explicit porn or other adult material
• 9 of them were in a foreign language with English keyword stuffing for the benefit of Google
• 3 of them contained the entire article from this blog in direct violation of copyright law

So tell me:

Why would I want to link off-site to some content thief, linking to my own article that resides on their servers?

Why would I link out to websites where more than 70% of them are trash?

Why would I link out to spammy MFA (Made-For-AdSense), regurgitated, key word stuffed websites that have no relevance to my readers?

I do not mind that people are not directing traffic here to me, I installed the plug-in to have worthwhile links going out so that readers would find interesting content to browse on other websites. But when those links going out are irrelevant crap that is a complete waste of time, I am doing a huge disservice by providing those links on my blog.

Even worse, if you post pictures in your articles, the Related Websites plug-in shows the first image in the post as part of the excerpt. A feature I actually liked, until you realise that the people linking to you are pulling those pictures from your website, using your server, and your bandwidth, in effect image leeching, generating false visitor statistics and polluting your referrer log. It’s great to see hundreds of new "visitors" in your website statistics each day, but only if they are real and not bogus hits which are skewing the results.

The Related Websites plug-in sounds like a great plan in theory but unfortunately falls apart the moment that someone decides to exploit it for their own gain. I do not see how to easily fix this at this time except to have people involved in voting up and down the related links for relevancy. As the network of related websites grows bigger I can only see the problem of spam blogs exacerbating the situation further.

If you are linking out to spam blogs, scraper blogs or just plain trash blogs that add nothing to the discourse you are not only hurting the image of your blog, you are penalizing yourself by promoting the spam and pushing down your own page rank. Google penalizes your website for what links out and, to a lesser extent, what links in.

Until Blog Traffic Exchange performs a purge of their database of spam blogs I will be removing the Related Websites plug-in from this website and I recommend that you do the same if you are using it.

Related Websites plug-in also needs to be changed to allow you to switch off the images within the “related websites” section both of your own blog, and when serving the excerpts up to other people. I hate waking up one morning to find questionable adult images within my own blog if I was not the one who put them there.

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Of all the blogging applications I have tried over the past two years that supposedly make writing your blog posts easier, the latest release of Microsoft Windows Live Writer is about the best of them in terms of features, capability and compatibility. It is also free.

Here are seven features I would dearly love to see integrated in to the Live Writer application within the next 24 months.

1. Expanded Functionality From Other Microsoft Products

If Microsoft Office is installed, use some of the functionality from it. Microsoft Word has a better dictionary, a better thesaurus, and better proofing tools than Windows Live Writer, so why not leverage that functionality? Microsoft Excel offers great table layout and charting capabilities. Microsoft PhotoGallery (part of the Windows Live application suite) offers great tagging and browsing capabilities, Microsoft OneNote has powerful note taking and text recognition capabilities.

2. Import Documents

Being able to import a Microsoft Word or OpenOffice document or even an RTF or plain old text file straight in to Live Writer would save several steps. Copying and pasting may lose all or a partial amount of formatting between the source application and Live Writer which is pretty much unacceptable. Being able to import an Excel spreadsheet straight in to the middle of a document or a myriad of other formats would be immensely useful.

3. Take A Tip From Microsoft Word

Stop re-inventing the wheel when it comes to user-interfaces, just steal from Microsoft Word. Put all of the features that you use up front, where you can easily access them. Don’t make the user go looking for them, if you want to change font size, a frequent operation, the font properties need to be on the toolbar, where it gets used, not buried under a cascading menu system. Let the writer change styles easily, or even change all the styles within a post at one stroke, just like Word.

4. Built-In Scripting

A simple built-in scripting language, based around the .NET framework, would see an explosion of plug-ins available for the application that don’t become obsolete overnight the moment a new version of Live Writer is released. It looks like there are a lot of plug-ins available on the Windows Live website but very few of them actually work with the current version of Live Writer.

5. File Handling

The file handling in Live Writer is utterly dire. I want to put in a PDF or a ZIP for download I have to edit the source by hand or use one of the closed source solutions that may or may not work on the current Live Writer version, which may or may not generate ghastly HTML code that completely fails to blend with my blog’s theme. Make file handling a built-in feature of the application so that users do not need to rely on third-party applications.

6. Caching of blog posts

Writers do not always have Internet access. For the sake of productivity, they often shun it! When you’re pretty sure the document on the local hard drive is just as current as the one on the blog, the application should be able to pull it from a local cache and edit that instead of the one on the server.

While you’re at it, go ahead and cache the list of blog posts too, so that the time between deciding to edit or tweak a previous blog post is reduced and the user is not left waiting for the entire list of blog posts to download each time they want to edit one.

7. Different Views

Full screen view? Draft view? Not having either of these options is fine if you write and edit in Microsoft Word or other word processing application that does offer them, but if Windows Live Writer wants to be a contender for blog post editor of choice then it must become a more capable word processor.

Bonus Feature!

8. Synchronized Source Editing

I know it is a blog post writing application and not a HTML text editor, so actually having a fully featured HTML editor in Live Writer does not really make that much sense. But if the user has a HTML editor available on the machine, make Live Writer integrate with that, automatically synchronize the HTML between Live Writer and the HTML editing application such as Adobe Dreamweaver.

And The One Feature That Is Broken – Find and Replace

The find feature feels like something that came from the 1980’s, and there is no “replace” so do not go looking for one. Find frequently “forgets” what you were searching for. You are prevented from editing your blog post with the find dialogue open ala Microsoft Word. It is not possible to find across multiple blog posts or blog drafts, and there is little point anyway because you cannot do a “replace.” Broken. Broken. Broken.

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