So this page is basically a list of the plugins that I use on my blogs, with a brief summary and link for each one.
the first plugin is to be my own “BlogTactics NoFollow” plugin.
I had this made for me to allow me to easily add the “nofollow” tag to blogroll links as Google gave a couple of myblogs a PR0 and the only reason I could see for them having done so was the blogroll links. A week or so after I added the plugin to those blog the PR came back, so I guess it did the trick! ?

Here’s the link for the “No Follow” plugin: –


WordPress NoFollow Blogroll Links Plugin

Update: New Plugin for WP 2.8.1: –

I updated this blog to the WP ver 2.8.1 recently and it seems that WordPress for some reason have decided to get rid what I always found to be one of the most useful features in WP, the ability to add a “Text Widget” that you could basically put any text or html code in to and have it display in your sidebar wherever you placed the widget.

I have no idea why they’ve done this, and it could be that I simply can’t find the feature, but I had to come up with a way to deal with the problem in order to get all the bits I want back in to my sidebar.

The solution i’ve come up with is to create some simple text widgets that I can upload as plugins, and once they’re activated they show up in the widgets menu, so I can add stuff back in.

I’ve made a new video showing how to use these widget which will add as a post as soon as I can here: –

Va JC 2.8.1″ href=”https://blogtactics.com/adding-text-widgets-in-wp-2-8-1″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>Nqqvat Grkg Jvqtrgf Va JC 2.8.1

Here’s the download link for the text widget plugins, there’s 5 at present, but let me know if you need more and I’ll add them…


Text Widget Plugin for WP 2.8.1

My Must Have Plugins List

and here’s a list of 20 odd other plugins that I use, it’s not a complete list, but these are the plugins that I use most often on all of my blogs, and all except one are free.

They’re all pretty easy to get set up and configured, but as soon as I’ve caught up on my backlog of videos to make I’ll also do some showing how to use each of the plugins, just to make sure you’re getting the most out of them.

So here’s the list: –

All-In-One SEO Pack


All-In-One SEO Pack Plugin

Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog, By uberdose.
This is a must have plugin as far as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) goes, as it takes care of most of what you need for your blog.

Auto-hyperlink Url’s


Auto-hyperlink Urls Plugin

Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog, By uberdose.
This is a must have plugin as far as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) goes, as it takes care of most of what you need for your blog.

Auto Social Poster [Not Free]


Auto Social Poster Plugin

Bookmarks your posts to a wide range of social bookmarking sites automatically, with randomization built in to reduce footprints and make sure your SB accounts don’t get flagged.

Brian’s Threaded Comments


Brians Threaded Comments Plugin

Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog, By uberdose.
This is a must have plugin as far as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) goes, as it takes care of most of what you need for your blog.

Google Sitemaps


Google Sitemaps Plugin

Bookmarks your posts to a wide range of social bookmarking sites automatically, with randomization built in to reduce footprints and make sure your SB accounts don’t get flagged.

MaxBlogPress DealDotCom Widget

DealDotCom Widget Plugin

Show the latest deal of the day from DealDotCom in your blog and earn lifetime commission from the sale, By MaxBlogPress. This is a pretty simple way of monetizing your blog, but only really useful if your blog is in the “make money online” or internet marketing niche. You can see an example in the sidebar on this blog.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Ping Optimizer Plugin

Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer, By MaxBlogPress. A real useful plugin to make sure you’re only pinging valid ping addresses.

No Duplicate Comments

No Duplicate Comments Plugin

Prevent visitors from leaving duplicate comments/pingbacks/trackbacks to a post, reducing spam, By Scott Reilly.

Permalink Migration


Permalink Migration Plugin

With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and even doesn’t hurt your google pagerank, By Dean Lee. This is VERY USEFUL if you have started a blog with the default permalink struture and want to change it to the best permlink structure for SEO purposes – see previous post here – seo friendly wp permalink structure

Post Teaser


Post Teaser Plugin

Post Teaser generates a preview or “teaser” of a post for the main, archive and category pages, with a link underneath to go to the full post page. It includes features to generate a word count, image count, and an estimated reading time, By WeyHan Ng.

Related Posts


Related Posts Plugin

Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov, Mike Lu & Jon Bourne.

Similar Posts


Similar Posts Plugin

Displays a list of posts similar to the current one by comparing the way they use words. By Rob Marsh, SJ.

Subscribe to Comments


Subscribe to Comments Plugin

Simple plugin that allows people to subscribe when they make a comment on a post, so that they then receive an email whenever someone else places a follow up comment on the same post. Obviously this is a fantastic way to get people to come back to your blog.

Trackback Validator


Trackback Validator Plugin

Eliminates spam trackbacks with surprising accuracy (see website for details). By Dan Sandler and Andres Thomas-Stivalet.

TweetMyBlog!


TweetMyBlog Plugin

Updates your twitter account with each new post to your blog. By John Merrick & Soren Jordansen.

Unique Articles Wizard


Unique Articles Wizard Plugin

Receive unique articles directly into wordpress – with full control over categories By Dr. Noel Swanson.
This plugin is free, you don’t need to be a full member of UAW to use it, check out the previous post and video to see how to find it –
Automated Blog Posts Free Plugin

Weasel’s No HTTP Author


Weasels No HTTP Author Plugin

Checks to see if the author name in your comments contains “HTTP:” to help filter out spam. This only sets the “spam” flag on the comment; Akismet does the dirty work and actually removes and reports the comment. By Andy Moore.

What Would Seth Godin Do


What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin

Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors to encourage them to sign up as an RSS subscriber, By Richard K Miller.

WordPress Database Backup

WordPress Database Backup Plugin

On-demand backup of your WordPress database, By Scott Merrill.
This may not be the best WP backup plugin, it’s simply the one I’ve been using for ages. I believe there is another one that will do backups automatically and email them to you, which sounds more useful…

WordPress Stats


WordPress.com Stats Plugin

Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors to encourage them to sign up as an RSS subscriber, By Richard K Miller.

WP-Grins


WP-Grins Plugin

A Clickable Smilies hack for WordPress, basically this adds smileys to the post and comments options, which is kinda cool. By Alex King.

WP PlugIM


WP PlugIM Plugin

Adds PlugIM button to your WordPress blog posts. By Sudar.
Only really useful if your blog is in the “make money online” or internet marketing niche.

WP-SphinnIt


WP-Grins Plugin

Adds SphinnIt button to your WordPress blog posts. By Michelle MacPhearson.
Only really useful if your blog is in the “make money online” or internet marketing niche.

AdSense Deluxe

AdSense Deluxe Plugin

This plugin makes it a lot easier to add AdSense adds to your blog.

Hope this helps, and don’t forget to popback and check for new ones now and then, or just sign up for the RSS or newsletter to get informed when I add new stuff..

This Post Has 52 Comments

  1. Jeremy

    I can’t seem to figure out how to add adsense to my new blog. I was hoping to get your plugisns and can’t find em either 🙁

    1. coration

      First of all i wanna say that this is a great post, i downloaded and installed almost all of them, some of them however return into an error on the down page.
      To get adsense on your website you should go to the google.com/adsense page, than you can make and customize an add, and than you get the code, you copy paste the code from google, into your WIDGET editor, as txt, just clikc txt and paste it in there. It’s not a plugin. After that you should wait a while, untill google’s crawler found your site, and analyzed your information.

      1. admin

        Hi Coration,
        using widgets to put adsense on a blog is the simple way to do so, but it does mean that the ads are in your sidebar, not in the post itself.
        The purpose of the AdSense Delux plugin is to allow you to easily include AdSense within posts themselves.
        cheers,
        Matt Garrett

        1. coration

          ow that’s nice. So you just click on the topic to comment, and then the ads should show up in the post itself by itself?

  2. Paul

    Hi there Matt,

    Any ETA on getting your plug-in page back up and running? Was looking forwards to downloading your noFollow plugin!!

    cheers

    Paul

    1. admin

      Hi Paul,
      I’ve added the nofollow plugin link back above and I’ll try and get the rest of the plugin links added later this week.
      cheers,
      Matt

  3. Daydah

    Er… Matt,
    Nice site and all, but I was led here by Caroline MiddleBrook with a promise of getting the plugin – NoFollow. Cant seem to find it anywhere, so pls where else can I get it?
    Thanks in advance,
    Daydah

    1. admin

      Hi Daydah,
      I’ve just added the link for the nofollow plugin back on to the page above for you, apologies!
      🙂
      Matt

  4. Christopher Clayton

    argh, bring back the plugins =[

  5. admin

    Sorry Chris, I’ve added the nofollow plugin link back on above, and I’ll try and get the rest of this page rebuilt later this week.
    cheers,
    Matt

  6. admin

    The Plugins page is back and updated with a much bigger list!
    🙂
    Matt

  7. Phil Wiley

    Hi Matt

    Re No 19, the WordPress Database Backup.
    The one that sends backups by email is WP-DB-Backup. I use it on all my blogs.

    http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

    What I’ve done is set up a Gmail account just for the backups, and I’ve got WP-DB-Backup setup so that it backs up the database daily, direct to the gmail account. Then every few weeks I’ll login to the Gmail account and delete all the emails except those from the past few days.

    Phil

    1. admin

      Hi Phil,
      thanks for the link for the WP-DB-Backup plugin, I’ll go grab a a copy and check it out.
      Using a seperate GMail account for the backups to be sent to is also an excellent suggestion!
      🙂
      cheers,
      Matt Garrett

  8. Paul Shipgood

    Your link for the Auto Social Poster Plugin contains an error.

    The URL comes up as: “http://www.mat4com/files/asp.thml” but of course should be:
    “http://www.mat4.com/files/asp.thml” (i.e. with a dot between mat and com).

    Also my revised attempt at loading with the dot still failed so I tried it ending with /asp.html in case that was also wrong but this didn’t work either, though I can get just http://www.mat.com to work but that takes me to the Mat4.Com : SEO, Internet & Affiliate Marketing Videos page
    (one of your sites, I guess – who’s the yeti in the shades? 😆 )

    1. admin

      Ooops!
      Well spotted Paul, and thanks!
      I’ve made the corrections so it works now.
      and yup, that’s me in the yeti jacket, it’s my ski gear…
      🙂
      Matt

  9. Louise

    Regarding No. 8, it’s no longer necessary as it’s been integrated into WordPress now 🙂 .

  10. Carey

    I just wanted to say thank you to you! I recently downloaded the podpress plug-in to start using podcast on my blog and I had no idea how to figure out how to actually get the podcast on my posts.

    I went and read the wordpress instructions in codex (I think that’s what it’s called,) I read the installation instructions in podpress and still I could not get it to work…then I did a search on how to do this and I found your videos part 1 and 2 and VOILA I now know how to upload a podcast on my blog.

    Thanks so much for the easy to understand and follow instructions for this. I truly appreciate it. Btw, I just bookmarked your blog.

    Have a great day!

    Carey

  11. Yvette

    Hi there
    Is there any feedback on the Auto Social Poster Plugin? Curious to know if it’s working.
    Regards,
    Yvette 😛

    1. admin

      Hi Yvette,
      I use the auto social poster on pretty much all of my blogs and am very happy with the results. 🙂
      There’s a banner for it at the bottom of this page.
      🙂
      cheers,
      Matt

  12. Peter

    Hi Matt,

    I found your site using the keyword unique content, I was impressed with the details on the video, however, in your plugin list if I open the link to receive the free plugin from unique article wizard, the link takes me to the sales letter and there is no mention of the free download.

    Kind Regards

    Peter

  13. Mike Maggs

    Hello Matt,

    I’m having another upload/refresh problem. This time with plugins. I’ve sucessfully uploaded the following plugins; postTeaser, Google sitemap generator, Wp-23 related, and subscribe to comments. Neither of these are showing up in my admin so that I can activate them. Any suggestions?

    Mike Maggs

    1. admin

      Hi Mike,
      um, I know this may seeman obvious quesion, but have you uploaded them to the public_html/wp-content/plugins/ folder?
      and you did unzip them first, rather than uploading the zip files.
      apologies if these seem obvious things, but it’s always the best palce to start.
      cheers,
      Matt

    2. Phil Wiley

      Mike,
      the usual problem, when plugins don’t appear in your admin, is that they are nested inside another folder.
      Example: the all-in-one-seo plug in comes as a zip file.
      If you unzip it you see a folder called all-in-one-seo-pack. But if you upload that folder it doesn’t appear, and that’s because there’s another all-in-one-seo-pack folder nestled inside that one.
      So before uploading plugins just make sure there are no nestled folders, and if there are just upload the last one you get to.
      phil

      That should do it.

      1. admin

        Hi Phil,
        well spotted, I hadn’t thought of that one!
        thanks! 🙂
        cheers,
        Matt
        p.s. hope you’re well Phil, long time no speak! 😎

      2. Christopher

        Thanks Phil and Matt,
        I have been searching for that answer on how to get the all in one seo pack to work on my blog and just didn’t know who to ask. Had it uploaded on my server in the plugins file and it just wouldn’t show up in the wordpress admin to activate it. Took your advise and its up and running now.
        Thanks again for solving my problem. 😀

  14. Phil Wiley

    I’m doing great Matt, been a bit quiet online because I’ve been on vacation so much this year. Only been back working for a few weeks since I took off in early August, and I’m off again next week but only for 5 or 6 days (it’s summer here in Australia, and right now it’s about 34c here which is in the 90’s fahrenheit)

    BTW, the reason I know my way around WordPress is that most of my sites these days are WordPress blogs. Often a combo of quality original content and content pulled from YouTube, etc. Example of one I’m working on at the moment: http://www.ionlywannabewithyou.com
    Most of the original content I have written for me is on the right of the page under The Very Best Of I Only Wanna

    Have a good Christmas 🙂

    phil

    1. admin

      I remember reading in one of your newsletters about your parents visiting and your daughter’s wedding, I hope it all went well! 🙂
      it’s not quiet that warm here in good ol'”blighty”!
      WP does make it a lot easier to build out good quality sites, and the range of plugins available mean you can do so much with them, especially with automation, which is always cool!
      gimme a shout when you’re next back in the UK, we must find time for a beer or two this time.. 😉
      cheers,
      Matt

  15. Joshua Collins

    Great post Matt!
    I have a question or two…
    Does that no-follow work automatically or do we have to manually add a check next to a box when adding links? Cause I do not see a box that I must check 😉
    And second, is it a good idea to maybe set-up a silo of some sort? For instance, the same company that created Auto Social Poster – nice plugin by the way – has created a plugin that Silo’s Pagerank… Or at least that is what I gather it does. The way it does this is by adding no-follows on certain links throughout the blog and optimizing the blog for PR by limiting the PR leak.
    Would that be good, or is that really just some mumbo jumbo stuff and is just a way for mass-automation to sell another plugin?
    Was just curious cause I am not an expert in SEO when it comes to PR leaking.

    Thanks,
    Joshua Collins

  16. admin

    Hi Joshua,

    The “No Follow” isn’t automated, as you may only want to use it for some links.
    once you’ve activated the “Nofollow-links.php” plugin when you go to add or edit a link simply click on the “Link Relationship (XFN)” menu and you should then see and extra tick box for “pr_nofollow” at the top of the list.

    yup, the auto social poster plugin (http://www.wpautosocialposter.com) rocks!

    I’ve not seen their new plugin, but will check it out, if it stops PR leakage and refocuses it where needed it could be very useful. I’ll make a post about it here or on IMTesting.com once I’ve checked it out.

    cheers,
    Matt

  17. Carl Barton

    That nofollow plugin is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I was getting worried that google would penalise me for all the blogs I link to on my blogroll, but I also need some dofollow links that link to other sites and resources. Nice and simple to implement all that with this plugin.

    Cheers,
    Carl.

  18. Philip

    Any “no follow” plugins for the list of pages? Really just want to control the PR juice within my own site, but can’t seem to find any plugins that accomplish this.

    1. admin

      Hi Philip,
      grab the All In One SEO Plugin, that should do everything you need with regard to adding no follow to things like the categories links.
      cheers,
      Matt Garrett

  19. June

    Hi Matt,

    I have been installing some of the plugins that you have suggested on my new blog. Thank you for this post, BTW, but I have a question about setting Brians Threaded Comments. Do you leave blank the Max Nesting Levels or do you only allow say 4? Also, what would the Custom Comments Target: option be used for? What do you consider the proper settings?
    Thanks,
    June

    1. admin

      Hi June,
      I’ve always just left the settings in the Brians Threaded Comments plugin as they are.
      cheers,
      Matt

  20. Ralph Morton

    Maybe I am going a little nuts, I have spent the last half hour looking for the adsense plugin. Can’t seem to find it.

    noviorbis

    1. admin

      Hi Ralph,
      nope, you’re not going nuts, I hadn’t added it to the list, sorry!
      it’s there now as number 24.
      🙂
      cheers,
      Matt

  21. Suzi

    Hi Matt. The link for adsense deluxe goes to quite an old version (last updated June 2006) will this still work ok on the latest version of wordpress?

    Thanks,
    Suzi

    1. admin

      Hi Suzie,
      yup, it still works.
      cheers,
      Matt

  22. Kathleen

    Hi Matt,

    Just wanted to send a quick note saying thank you for all the great information. I just started using WordPress and your website is a godsend. I plan on spending the next week digesting the information contained on your site and in your video’s so I can put together a plan of attack for my blogs.

    Thanks,
    Kathleen

  23. Matt thanks for your suggestion i will install the plugins and you gave me hips more ideas that I used wonder about but now, I know!

    This is great and by the way thanks for your reply.

    “Why do you use No Follow plugin on your blog?

    kind regards
    Michael.

  24. shirley

    thanks for the post. all are great Plugins!

    I have a little challenge – I installed the Adsense-Deluxe, and when I click on the Adsense-Deluxe settings, it gives me an error saying – YOU DONT HAVE PERMISSION to access

    I am using WP 2.8 and chmod 777 on the directories already. can you help ?
    thanks

  25. I installed almost all plugins talked here; very good article! Trying hard to get PR higher from zero.
    kind regards

    Egon

  26. jim kelly

    Hi Matt,

    I have great google rankings,but no sales

    What is my next big step please, as no one else will tell me

    regards

    jim

    1. admin

      Hi Jim,
      I’d recommend not having quite so many adverts and concentrating on building a mailing list with an autoresponder (like http://mg.gd/a/aweber or http://wizardautoresponder.com) by offering a free report of some sort to get people to sign up to your email list, then you can mail them offers directly on a regular basis.
      hope this helps!
      Matt

  27. Ron

    I am trying to figure out how I can set up my blog to auto post through a customized RSS feed and cannot seem to get it. Basically, I want to set the parameters of the feed and have it simply create new posts once a day based on the content I tell it to pull. Can anyone help me out on this?

    Thanks!
    Ron

  28. luis

    Just wanted to say THANKS 😀 Matt for all your help and all that good info you post in your blog

    God Bless

    sullu70

  29. Bec

    Wanted to mention that the no follow blogroll php page link you have on this page produces a page not found error. I did find the zip download link in your top 12 plugins article via the search engine.

    Keep up the good work, I’m learning a ton of stuff here!

    1. admin

      Hi Bec,
      thanks, I’ve corrected the broken link! 😳
      cheers,
      Matt

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