Mistakes most bloggers still make till today

In this article I am going to explain some mistakes most bloggers make till today. While interacting with some bloggers recently I found out most of them make these common mistakes often. It was surprising to know that both the news ones and those that have been around the block for awhile make these mistakes, so I have decided to address the mistakes here, and warn you of its dangers and how to protect your blog from harm.

In an earlier article on this blog titled “Top 10 Common Mistakes New Bloggers Make”, I listed 10 common blogging mistakes peculiar to new bloggers, but today I am going to discuss blogging mistakes made by even Pro Bloggers.

Blogging Mistakes made by even Pro Bloggers:

1. Do you have Backups? Do you know that more than 60% of the blogs on the internet today do not have a backup? It is shocking to find out that most bloggers don’t care about backing up their hard work. I have published over 700 articles on this blog, without backup I will be taking a very huge risk.

Without backups you may lose your hard work someday, your site could be hacked or your hosting server may crash or worse. You have to backup your blog always for the unplanned. There are tons of great backup plugins out there that can backup your entire WordPress site and database in a few clicks.

Cloud backup to services such as Amazon, Dropbox and others etc will be easier and effortless. I personally use the WordPress Backup to Dropbox Plugin to perform a daily backup of my blog to my Dropbox account.

2. Still using Admin username? The most common mistakes most bloggers still make till today is using the “admin” username on their blogs. Using the admin username for your WordPress login is taking a huge risk, no matter how complex you think your password may be.

Blogs with admin usernames are most likely to be hacked someday. Just recently a blogger asked me to help him fix something on his dashboard and when he sent his login details over I saw he was still using the admin username, I was shocked to know that most people still do.

Please my advice today is to change your administrative username to something else other than admin. You can use the iThemes Security plugin to properly protect your blog. With this plugin you can rename the admin user and protect your blog.

3: External Dofollow links: Are your external links dofollow? Then it’s just a matter of time before you receive a manual penalty slap from Google. Under the “Unnatural links from your site” section of the Google Webmaster guidelines, Google has warned that they will punish any site they perceive as selling links or participating in link schemes.

The penalty includes de-ranking or removing it from search engines entirely. The truth remains that there is no way Google can say for sure that you sold a link; they simply perceive any site that gives away link juice as part of the scheme and will issue you a manual penalty. So ensure to make your external links “nofollow” today before you get the manual penalty.

4: Are you using CDN? CDN is simply content delivery network and as a blogger you should use one for obvious reasons. I know some people may say their site is pretty fast and does not require a CDN to make it faster, but I am telling you that CDN performs other useful functions than the speed of a site.

CDN adds a layer of security to your site, protects a site from malicious attacks such as SQL injection and DOS attacks while saving your hosting server a good bandwidth. There are free CDN services such as CloudFlare, Incapsula, JsDelivr, and SwarmCDN to chose from, but I will recommend MaxCDN if you really better protection and support. Use this MaxCDN Coupon that offers 25% off.

5: Hosting: Another common mistake most bloggers make till today is using poor hosting services. Do you know your web hosting can be working against your search engine ranking? Remember page speed (general site speed) is a search engine ranking factor and sites with good page speeds tend to outrank those with poor page speed.

How fast is your hosting server and how consistent is its uptime? Before choosing any hosting service try as much as possible to read what others have to say about it, I agree no hosting is 100% reliable but how fast and technically capable is the support team to solving your hosting problems in the short period of time?

In summary these mistakes can adversely affect your blog. You can also read other “Blogging mistakes that could kill your blog”. If you are making any of these mistakes, I hope you correct them now before it is too late. Fix these mistakes today and build a safer blog.