Captcha & Increased Traffic

I haven't had much spare time lately but I've started to make small changes to BB Articles. I added a Captcha to the sign in page because the site was getting spammed. Submitters will need to visit the site now because automatic submission software won't work.

What I could really do with is a script that will decline plagiarised articles. My heart sinks when I log on and see a long list of articles waiting for approval. About 3 out of 20 are approved, the rest are plagiarised, advertorials, have links in the body of the article which most directory sites don't accept, or are too short. I have a minimum wordage to 500, although if a 450+ word article is full of good information I let them through. I now have a script that I can run to automatically delete articles of less than 450 words.

Some directories have a much lower wordage allowed but the best usually want 500+. Some of the more experienced directory owners say that less than 500 is an advert. I'm not sure if I agree with that but I wonder how small articles fare with google. When I use my web design software XSitePro it warns me to increase wordage on a page to 500 because it helps with google rankings. If that's so it makes sense to ask for 500 word articles, better for the writer and the site.

When I searched for BB-Articles in the google rankings it said that the site couldn't be ranked because of nofollow links which must have been set with the software, though a lot of the pages are indexed. I'm not sure what to do about that because they will have been set because there are so many outbound links which the robots would follow off the site. Maybe a google sitemap will solve that problem.

The Alexa rankings are doing great. Around 1,011,000 when I looked a couple of days ago. That might sound high but BB Articles has risen over 500,000 in around 3 weeks since the last time that I checked. I was curious and checked out some of the competition at random and out of 15 sites BB Articles was fifth in the rankings. The lowest was over 5,000,000 and the highest around 40,000. As all of those sites are older and more established the result was very pleasing.

I read somewhere that the Alexa rankings were something to do with traffic, which figures because traffic has steadily increased since the site was launched just over 2 months ago. The biggest increase becan when I started to use Traffic Explosion which was launched on August 22nd. I was sceptical about it working but the site stats tell me it is bringing traffic in and that will grow as more join.

I joined a web ring of article directories yesterday so hopefully that will help to increase traffic.