Fixing my blog problems

I decided to check the status of my support request on the wordpress.org forums today. It was regarding the missing navigational links on the front page of my blog. It was very difficult to navigate posts because there were no links to older posts. There were no replies to my query, but a saw a reply to another query that said to disable all the plugins and enable them all individually. So I decided that would be a good idea and hey, presto! It was the Adhesive plugin that I had installed, which allows you to make a single post ‘sticky’ and stay at the top of the page, that was disabling the links. I don’t know how, but since I never used it it’s gone. Joy! Easier navigation is now at hand.

I believe that getting rid of the adhesive plugin also fixed my sitemap problems. The sitemap linked only to itself under the internal posts section, now it links to all the posts. I now have links to the XHTML sitemap and XML sitemap at the bottom of the page. There’s a good article about creating sitemaps and why you would at Pearsonified.

I’ve recently seen some articles about ‘do follow’. Essentially it’s a bit of an anti rel=nofollow movement. rel=nofollow is automatically put into links in the comments of WordPress, Typepad and Blogger blogs, and probably others. The idea (from what I’ve gathered) is that it prevents search engines from indexing those links, so they don’t count towards page rankings. I’ve seen claims that this was initially done to prevent spam, or remove the incentive for comment spamming – obviously it didn’t serve that purpose. The first article I read about this was by David Airey, then I read one on Search Engine Journal, and I had a look at the list of plugins you can get to combat this compiled by Andy Beard. I don’t think I’m a do follow groupie, but I’ve installed the Dofollow plugin. To see what happens, if anything.

I’m still having a problem with a big gaping space beneath the footer of my blog. I’m fairly certain it’s caused by the madKast script, but I don’t know why.