WebProNews and the iEntry Network have launched a new WordPress plugin utilizing this tool. With WordPress being the most popular blogging platform, and Facebook being the most popular social network, we think a lot of people will be interested. 

"Registration is an integral part of any web presence," says Mike Marr, who developed the plugin. "It puts a name to our virtual guests – an otherwise very difficult task." 

"Facebook’s Registration Tool gives developers a familiar face from which users are encouraged to register, all the while streamlining the process for the vast number of existing Facebook users," he adds. "It makes sense that you would want this tool as a part of any website, including those powered by WordPress. Thus, we simply put the pieces of the puzzle together, and want to share with the community what we’ve come up with."

As Facebook’s Paul Tarjan explained when the company launched its tool, it can minimize the friction associated with signing up for a new account. That means a possible increase in conversions.  

Install the plugin from your WordPress back-end, or download it from WordPress here. To activate it, use the "plugins" menu option in your admin control panel. You’ll see a "Facebook Registration" options page under settings. Just enter your Facebook App ID and App Secret here. 

 The WordPress plugin requires WordPress version 3.0 or higher. Of course we would love feedback on the plugin, so if you have any comments or questions, or have issues with it, email developer Mike Marr at marr@beyondwp.com.

More info about the plugin can be found at BeyondWP.com.

Apparently the Facebook Connect WordPress plugin has now leaked. Though still in beta mode, it would allow Facebook members to connect with one another via comments on WordPress blogs. This is not unlike what Movable Type has done.

"The difference with the Facebook WordPress plugin is that the WordPress plugin is an internal Facebook project," writes Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook – the Unofficial Facebook Blog. "This also means that Facebook wants to be able to own the comments on your site. Anytime you enable users to login via Facebook, you won’t have access to their email address, unlike Disqus and native WordPress comments. That would probably be my greatest complaint."

Facebook did contact O’Neill and said that it was not an official Facebook project, so I guess it is still up in the air when it comes to that. With the Movable Type version, Facebook users who visit Movable Type sites can sign in to their Facebook accounts without creating a new one. Profile pictures and names can be displayed, and friends updated when you "participate on the web."

I’m assuming that the WordPress version will serve basically the same purposes. There’s no word on when it will be released to the public. Facebook made O’Neill remove it, and probably have had others do the same.

1) Advanced Editor

The WYSIWYG editor evolves and now includes eleven new ‘advanced’ functions. Just hit the little colored squares icon on the right of the main toolbar and you’ll get the additional buttons.

Included are:
Format dropdown for header tags.
Underline
Align Full
Text Color
Paste as plain text.
Paste from Word. Fixing my previous complaint.
Clear Formatting.
Clean Up Code. OMG I think I’m in love.
Special characters.
Undo and Redo.

2) Tagging
Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer needed now that WordPress will do tagging. Actually, Ultimate Tag Warrior had many more features so I guess it can’t be ruled out all together. But the new tagging functionality is nice. I can see people getting confused with tags and categories now as they are very similar.

A nice touch is the ability for Wordpess’ tagging system to import tags from other plugins. The WordPress team was really thinking on this one.

3) Auto Updates
If a plugin is hosted on WordPress.org, or if it ties into the new API, it’ll now check for updates automatically and notify you on the plugins page. No more wondering which plugins are out of date. WordPress as a whole should do the same thing.

4) Canonical URLs
This is a fancy way of saying they fixed a lot of possible URL issues. From www vs non-www URLs to automatically setting up redirects for when a user changes a post slug.

It even says that WordPress will now redirect URLs that get cut off in emails to the correct post. This means that if someone types in most of your URL, but is missing part of it, WordPress will find the best match and display that. It’s very user friendly but not necessarily search friendly as it can cause duplicate content issues.

Example:

Original: http://www.site.com/blog/this-is-my-post/

Cutoff URL: http://www.site.com/blog/this-is-m

Now the cutoff URL will show the same content without redirecting to the correct URL. I’m sure someone will fix this pretty soon.

There are other new features in WordPress 2.3 too, just not as noticeable to the user. Th is a great update to already amazing software package. Just be sure that your plugins are all 2.3 compatible before upgrading to ensure you have the best experience possible.

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New version 2.3 offers a wide range of enhancements and new features, including:

• Tagging
• Automatic notification of updated plugins
• Automatic notification when new WP versions are released
• Much better management of posts and draft posts
• Improvements to the built-in text editor
• Automatic site addressing (if your address has ‘www’ in it or not, WP will let people find your site)
• A number of technical changes such as additional SQL database tables, multiple category widgets, better support for languages other than  English and full support for Atom 1.0

See the full list here.

The new feature that most people will probably be the most interested in is tagging. Simply put, tagging  lets you add free-form labels to your posts so you can classify your content more flexibly than only by using more rigid categories.

Dougal Campbell has a good explanation of the differences between categories and tags. Also see Lorelle Van Fossen’s explanation.

I plan to upgrade to 2.3, first on my sandbox before here on the main blog. One reason for doing it this way is to be sure that all my plugins will work with the new version.

If you’re thinking about upgrading, be sure to review the upgrade guidelines from WordPress first. Then follow the upgrade instructions to the letter.

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"There are 93.8 million blogs worldwide," says SEO-PR president and co-founder Greg Jarboe. "Getting excited about getting a blog is like getting excited when the phone book arrives."

"Yeah, but, it’s your name in print," says Navin Johnson.

That’s not a reason to not have one though. A blog is still an effective way to get noticed and to gain an audience. "Things will starting happening to you now," reminds Navin.

But only if you do it right. "If you don’t have a blog, go ahead and start one," says Jarboe, "but the whole industry has moved on. It’s now about performance; it’s now about results."

Okay, so how do you get those results? Well, there’s probably not a finite set of things, but there are some good suggestions. Jarboe suggests staying away from turf already claimed. "Look for emerging terms. Find terms that are upcoming or growing in importancethat don’t have five years of entrenched bloggers competing for them."

But if you have to enter ground already well-traveled, it’s a good idea to get in good with those that know the road. Join their conversations, get their attention, earn a link.

Jarboe joins Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts, LLC in providing some expert advice on optimizing a blog, and we’ve organized that advice into a neat top ten list. (The plugins recommended are all for WordPress.)

10 Ways To Optimize Your Blog

1.    Tag clouds and tag pages; check out Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for creating these. Spencer says he doubled traffic to one his blogs by adding it.

2.    Add a "Related Posts" feature. Spencer recommends the Contextual Related Posts plugin for WordPress.

3.    Top Ten posts feature to display most popular posts

4.    Add "next" and "previous" post buttons

5.    Build inbound links

6.    Title tags – use SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress to assign unique title tags to individual posts.

7.    Claim your blog at Technorati and use Technorati tags

8.    Use "sticky" posts that always appear at the top of the page as a way to add a keywords-rich introduction to category pages. Adhesive plugin works for this.

9.    Use the Buzzlogic tool to find out which bloggers are most influential in conversations – refer to them and try to get them to link to you.

10.    Get into other bloggers’ blog rolls (trackbacks and comments won’t help in link gain.

Bonus: Rick Klau, who works in strategic partner development for Google, also has some solid advice for optimizing RSS feeds via Feedburner and even Facebook. He also reiterates the importance of providing full text feeds rather than partial feeds. Check out 10 Tips For Optimizing RSS.

• Greet visitors from search engines with a list of relevant posts.
• Enable visitors to subscribe to comments.
• Display your most popular posts.
• Easily interlink series of posts.

ProBlogger led me to the post, and there are even more useful plugins mentioned in the ProBlogger comments, including ones that enable you to:

• Greet returning visitors/commenters.
• Send a thank you e-mail to commenters.
• Remove nofollow selectively or completely from commenters (as Andy Beard mentioned in our comments).
• Add the magic sentence Nate Whitehill mentioned (from our first post on blog stickiness).

Why am I so obsessed with blog stickiness? Because for many bloggers, that’s one of our only goals–a low bounce rate. Also, other important blogging goals can be related to this, such as subscriptions and possibly affiliate or direct sales.

How have you improved your stickiness?

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I’m a huge fan of integration of analytics and making it easier for publishers to do as much as possible in one place. Since everyone who uses WordPress has to login to the dashboard to post, it’s going to be easy to check your stats quickly as well. I can save time to not have to go login an analytics application to get some quick blog stats, which means I have more time to create real value.

What does this mean for analytics companies? Probably not a ton, although it could hurt the blog-focused analytics packages a bit since WordPress integration will be easier and quicker for people to use, although I’m guessing less powerful.

I’m going to install it shortly and will give my thoughts on the stats it offers.

UPDATE:
It won’t accept my WordPress.com API key. I’m using the same one I’m using for Akismet, and the WordPress.com Stats page that asks for it is suggesting I use that one and it won’t accept it.

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The directory holds less than 150 plugins out of the thousands out there. What is there seems to be organized well and has a nice star rating scale, installation information, screenshots, a FAQ and even download stats for the plugin.

I then tried to add the FB StandardStats plugin and that’s where my excitement died.

Signing up for an account and submitting the basic plugin info was easy. A couple hours later I got notification that a SVN area was setup for my plugin and the URL took me to a page with no GUI, no instructions and no clues as to what to do next. A quick email back to support and they said it was easy, just get a SVN client and they sent me here.

Confused yet again, and not sure how to install the plugins they recommend, I went out and got a SVN stand alone application. That didn’t work as I had no idea the connection settings. So I ended up installing TortoiseSVN as they suggested and it worked.

I’ve got the plugin uploaded and ready to go, I think. But I have no idea what to do next or how to get it into the WordPress official directory. The whole ordeal isn’t user friendly and I can see how quickly it’d deter plugin authors from uploading their plugins. That is unless I’m the only one who doesn’t get the whole SVN thing.

I think the official WordPress plugin directory is a great idea, but I think it’s confusing and annoying to get a plugin listed. I’d recommend wp-plugins.net for a large database of WordPress plugins that is extremely easy to get included in.

What are your thoughts on the official WordPress plugin directory?

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Some of my blogging friends are aware of the problems, but have opted to use such a plugin anyway – I fully respect that decision, but many make that decision "blindly" without being aware of the possible consequences.

Is being included among Top Commenters really a benefit?

Does Top Commenters give more benefit to blog owners than the harm it can cause if you are not careful?

Traffic

Andy Beal introduced Top Commenters to his blog on 19th February, and since that time I have been among his top commenters most of the time. I didn’t change my commenting habits, and even argued against including it.

In almost 1 month those links, plus the links from my comments have driven a total of 29 visitors to my site – Google Analytics only picked up 23 of them, so I am sticking with the MBL numbers.

Without exception, the clicks seem to have been on posts where I have made a comment, thus nothing to do with appearing across the whole of Andy’s site on the sidebar.

This might question the value of text link ads for traffic on blogs, I suppose it depends on how much a visitor is worth to you.

SEO

Site wide might be looked on as something desirable from a high ranking blog, but the value is limited.

• It is in the sidebar, thus the value is diminished by the major search engines
• The link isn’t permanent – what effect does a link that appears and then disappears at the start of a new month have
• The link might not be relevant
• The link in many cases points to the root domain rather than laser targeted LSI Related Content.

This to a lesser extent questions the value of paid text links for SEO, but note with paid text links you choose the anchor text, and can choose to advertise for more than 1 month

Effect on The Hosting Blog

On a well designed blog, the negative effect of providing Top Commenters can be mitigated, but the majority of sites where I have seen this plugin implemented will experience a detrimental effect on their internal Google juice.

The problems associated with the Top Commenters Plugin are similar to those that can affect blogs which have long blogrolls.

• Theme design – the theme uses the same template file for for the front page and single pages, and thus plugin output appears across the whole site, including duplicate content pages. Good themes use single.php for individual posts, and also include archive.php and other template files for navigation and search pages
• Widgets – The WordPress Widget plugin is convenient – unfortunately every theme I have seen applies Widgets to every sidebar across a site, and thus the links will again appear everywhere, even if a single.php template exists.

Pouring Liquids

Lets take a situation that you have 10 glass milk bottles in a line, and one of them is filled up with milk.

Your challenge is to consecutively pour the contents of a bottle into its neighbour until you reach the end of the line. You have to do this as quickly as possible.

The smart thing to do would be to use a large funnel, that prevents milk escaping and only allows it to flow in the direction you intend. Without the funnel, lets say you lose 10% of your milk in each transfer, you would only have 39% of your milk in the last bottle.

WordPress Duplicate Content

With WordPress you have multiple navigation and archive pages that contain duplicate content, and on a poorly designed blog theme, would also include blogroll links and Top Commenters links.

• Date Based Archives
• Categories
• Sequential Pages – page1, page2
• Tag Pages

There are plugins available that add noindex nofollow to the meta tags on these duplicate content pages, and if you wanted to have total control, it is possible to ensure that the only links to your content come from your sitemap – in doing so you could potentially reduce other important factors in search engine calculations such as relevance.

I have seen blogs with as much as 90% external links on all their duplicate content pages.

Alternatively with no blogroll, and no Top Commenters plugin, you can reduce the number of external links on duplicate content pages to as little as 5%, even if you are generous with your external links within the content.

Dofollow – Remove Nofollow From Comments

This is my preferred alternative and I use it on all my WordPress blogs that have comments enabled.

• All comments provide permanent links, and you can make that link more relevant by using a deep link to related content on one of your own sites
• All trackbacks provide a followable permanent link between related content
• Comments only appear on the single pages that are gaining from other sites. They don’t appear on most duplicate pages.
• Real comments with related content surround your backlinks giving them enhanced value
• By cultivating and preserving Google Juice, it flows to where it matters, subsequently comment links on those pages are more valuable.

Here is a list of available dofollow plugins, and some alternatives that can be used for other google juice flow control.

Effects on Other Services

Site wide links do have an effect on other services such as Technorati and some meme trackers as I have recently discussed. This can be beneficial for the number of links, but remember that Technorati ranking is based on number of unique sites rather than the number of links.

More Comments

Maybe it influences some, but rewarding 5 or 10 people, when 100s of people take part in your blog isn’t the fairest system in the world. In addition the people who often try to be the top commenter for the link value often should be spending more time on their own blogs than commenting on yours.

I am all for encouraging discussion, but not at the detriment to someone elses real interests. Helping people sometimes isn’t encouraging them to spend hours per day commenting on your blog just to get a temporary site wide link that is of little short term, or long term value.

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*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

* DoFollow – many look on this as the granddaddy of NoFollow plugins – you just switch it on and it works, all nofollows are removed from comments and trackbacks.

* Dofollow (WP Plugin) – Sometimes I wish this one has been given a better more descriptive name. It includes the ability (optional) to remove nofollow from comments after a period of time.

* Link Love – this is a brand new plugin that removes nofollow after a certain number of comments have been made – this rewards regular commenters – one thing I like is that the detection is based upon email address and not domain or URL, so it allows a commenter to spread the links how they like.

* GoodLinks – This plugin looks extremely useful for many people who have layout problems when people post long URLs – it also removes NoFollow as an option

* Blank Target Comments – Another multi-purpose comment link plugin – it removes nofollow from only the comment author links, and adds target="_blank" – no link because it doesn’t seem to be available for download any more which is a shame.

* Remove Nofollow – Cristian Mezi from SeoPedia’s plugin – I am not sure of the history or features, but it is probably similar to the original DoFollow plugin.

* NoNofollow – Including this link for historical reasons – Bronski’s plugin doesn’t work with newer versions of WordPress, but credit where credit is due.

* WP-Nofollow – Again included for historical reasons – one of the first plugins for WP 1.2 based on the original MT plugin code

For those that like hacking core files Rob has a simple guide to removing nofollow, though I prefer to avoid hacking any core files as it makes keeping WordPress up to date easier.

Other Platforms

MoveableType users can find information on how to remove nofollow as well.

Some Plugins Not Included?

I did find a few other Nofollow plugins available, but they appear on sites that are using nofollow for links in their own comments, seemed to be copies of the same code others provided, or were just dead links so I didn’t include them here.

Add Nofollow

If you want to do the opposite, and add NoFollow to certain types of links, here are some resources. There are some great and totally legitimate reasons you might want to do this.

* Add Link Attribute – this plugin is extremely powerful in the hands of someone who wants to control the flow of Google Juice around their site. Some links are purely navigational, or link to forms or other pages both on or offsite that do not contain content. This plugin allows you to zap them without modifying core files.

* Wikipedia NoFollow – want to reclaim the Google Juice you send to Wikipedia that currently stops flowing, and turns Wikipedia into a black hole – this plugin is the perfect answer – if Wikipedia turn the flow back on, you can reciprocate just by switching the plugin off.

* WP Temp Nofollow – I am not sure how up to date this one is, but if you have hacked WordPress to remove the nofollow code, you could use something like this plugin to add nofollow back for a period of time. It was designed for older WordPress versions that didn’t have nofollow as standard.

* NoFollow from Home – This one is interesting from an SEO perspective in that it adds nofollow to links in your content on the home page

Add NoFollow Other Platforms

* NoFollow List (Drupal) – Allows you to add a list of sites to nofollow (such as Wikipedia)

Lots of people in the last few day have proclaimed (finally) an end to using Nofollow on their blog and many of them are friends or regular readers. Now whilst I would like to link to them all, there are far too many of them (plus I have something else planned). Instead I am going to link to the one that I feel is most significant. Dougal Campbell has just installed a DoFollow plugin, and as a core developer of WordPress, this is a major development. Maybe we can see some optional features within WordPress and WordPress.com soon.

I would love to add more to this list, so if you know of other plugins, especially for platforms other than WordPress, please let me know in the comments and I will add them to the list.

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*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

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About the Author

Andy Beard – Niche Marketing – Blog search engine perfomance, WordPress and general niche and affiliate marketing tips