Gabe Young

For all of my sites, I start off with activating Akismet. Eventually, for some of these sites, they grow very big and gain lots of traction. At that point, I’ll add Cookies for Comments to use in conjunction with Akismet. I’ve found that combo gives me the least amount of false positives.

A lot of it depends on what you’re doing with your two sites.

You could simply start with what you have and as your needs grow, you just add more resources to handle the load.

You can certainly disable comments if you’re not interested in engagement; some folks live by not allowing comments, like Seth Godin.

Keep in mind that many of the spam solutions can work together. For one of my sites, I use Akismet along with Cookies with Comments, the plugin esmi mentioned. You’ll have to see what combination works best for you.

I agree with Rev. You’ve done a great job getting regular content up there but one month is not enough time to gain enough traction.

If you want to rank well quickly, one suggestion is to focus on a sub-niche. So rather than all of WWE, maybe you focus on a few wrestlers, on events, -OR- on spoilers. Just pick on area instead of being so broad.

You should already have Akismet, you just have to activate it.

Sorry, let me clarify what I meant. Generally, the more popular a site is, the more attention it will have.

I, too, have some spam on sites that I have that are either new or barely used at the moment. However, for my sites that presently have a lot of activity, I have a proportionate amount of spam that comes along with it. For those sites, I use multiple spam plugins.

Forget about SEO for a moment. Structure your site for your users. If it means you need 4 categories and 20 tags to help users get to the right information quickly, then that’s what you use.

I look at spam as a form of flattery. Let’s face it, no one spams a site with no activity and no PR.

Since you’re just starting to get spam, Akismet should be all you need. As your needs grow, you may want to use another plugin in addition to Akismet.

I like option 1. File Name (file name being a link). My personal opinion is that you do not need buttons at all.

The rationale is that they are product specs and not necessarily calls to action. If you were selling something, using buttons like the way Amazon does makes more sense.

Just use concise, yet descriptive, anchor text for your links.

Perhaps you should swing by blogger support.

1. WP version is displayed in your admin dashboard

2. You can do a simple search on ebooks on your niche. If you don’t like what you see, there are a plethora of them for about $1 US on eBay.

3. For email collection, many folks leverage a email marketing services, like aweber for example.

Email accounts are typically provided by your hosting company. I would try reaching out to them first.

Especially for new sites, the biggest SEO “trick” is to create quality, unique content on a regular basis.

Here’s a link to a support post I contributed to a few months ago regarding blog editors: blog editors

If you’re looking for manual daily updates, depending on the area, you most likely just change the text in the admin panel.

If you’re seeking dynamic updates, rather than searching for a plugin, try looking for mortgage data that can be dropped into your site. Try searching for aggregated content. This is not WP specific but for any platform.