Most common autoblogging mistakes

[observer]

Hi everyone,
there are so many threads on "autobloging how-tos: guides, system, methods etc.

The forum doesn't need another "how-to" thread, I think... I would rather suggest everybody to share their "how not to" discoveries based on their own mistakes that have done in the past.

Some people succeed with their blogs and withing a week generate great traffic, some get blogs with no traffic or banned.

If you are a veteran and successful autoblogger, could you please share what you think are the most common autoblogging mistakes?

You can get technical if needed here...


P.S. I have 2 indexed 3-days blogs and wonder if what you list will be on my list of mistakes (as i don't have traffic yet myself) - 15 pages indexed, 50 backlinks, good domains - no traffic yet. Wonder when i can see some results... Or what to do to see results...

 

[ipopbb]

1. Not Geo-targeting Ads. Use an Ad system like OpenX and it is easy to change up offers and to sell country specific niche traffic at higher prices.

2. Not diversifying AdSense with CPA and other programs.

3. Not doing AB testing with ad copy and images.

4. Not doing enough niche research to target approachable markets of CPC value.

5. Not blocking low-CPC advertisers with the competitive filter.

I guess when it comes down to it... many people set up their autoblogs but forget to do the marketing. Autoblogs are a traffic generation tool. It is sound marketing practices that makes money.

6. Quitting. Most people quit within 10 months. That's why google's new website penalties last at most that long. If you quit in less then 10 months then you never stood a chance and you should get out of this business fast!

 

[foxler]

ipopbb, getting started in autoblogs and paying very close attention to the SEO detail. I was wondering what you suggest in terms of SEO for the category and tags in a wp type site, whether to do a noindex meta tag and what not for categories/tag pages.

As to some things/mistakes I have seen people do with autoblogs, is do the keyword research and create the blog in that particular niche they are targeting & just get random feeds on that topic, but once they are finished setting everything up, there is not a specific static type page that is focused on just that keyword that the research was done for. Thinking that simply creating a category within the blog would be enough to target that specific keyword or group of keywords.

 

[ipopbb]

ipopbb, getting started in autoblogs and paying very close attention to the SEO detail. I was wondering what you suggest in terms of SEO for the category and tags in a wp type site, whether to do a noindex meta tag and what not for categories/tag pages.

As to some things/mistakes I have seen people do with autoblogs, is do the keyword research and create the blog in that particular niche they are targeting & just get random feeds on that topic, but once they are finished setting everything up, there is not a specific static type page that is focused on just that keyword that the research was done for. Thinking that simply creating a category within the blog would be enough to target that specific keyword or group of keywords.

I would put a lot of emphasis on tag clouds and tagging. You are correct on the value of keyword focus per page, but that is hard to do. A lot of people will weekly or daily go in and manually tag the auto posts to be targeted for best keyword... example... if the auto content is for cd rates then spin the slug, tags, meta description, etc... for cd rates... setting those for say mortgage rates would likely dilute your relevance for the search term. Eventually you will have pages on mortgage rates too and every other related term but do focus on one or two terms and automate wherever possible.

Page Anchors are a great spliff for keyword density

<a href="#cd rates">cd rates</a> -
<a href="#find cd rates">find cd rates</a> -
<a href="#get cd rates">get cd rates</a>
<a href="#best get cd rates">best get cd rates</a>
<a href="#low get cd rates">low get cd rates</a>

<a name="cd rates">
<a name="find cd rates">
<a name="get cd rates">
<a name="best cd rates">
<a name="low cd rates">

Learned this trick from Google Health!

Image Maps are awesome too because you can put whole paragraphs into the alt tags and you can make as many rectangles as you need.

Learned this one from Target!

etc...

 

[observer]

great, guys.
ipopbb, you've mentioned...

Image Maps are awesome too because you can put whole paragraphs into the alt tags and you can make as many rectangles as you need.

could you please explain how it should be done? (as for a child lol)

assuming that we work with Wordpress....

 

[ipopbb]

great, guys.
ipopbb, you've mentioned...

Image Maps are awesome too because you can put whole paragraphs into the alt tags and you can make as many rectangles as you need.

could you please explain how it should be done? (as for a child lol)

assuming that we work with Wordpress....

I'm not a WordPress guru... I custom write my blogs so I can remotely manage thousands of them with little effort. I looked for a recommended Image Map plugin for you and didn't see one. I did find support on wordpress.org about adding them. Many people try from the Text editor and fail. Here is the recommendation for how to add one:

When editing a wordpress.org page / post, if you add HTML imagemap code into the Text editor (rather than switching to the HTML editor) it will disappear. Solution: always switch to HTML editor to add HTML (sorry if it sounds obvious)

Here is some example code...

<map name="myMap" id="myMap">
<area href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectangle" shape="rect" coords="x1, y1, x2, y2" alt="get good rectangles" />
<area href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle" shape="circle" coords="x3, y3, r" alt="buy circles" />
<area href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon" shape="poly" coords="x4, y4, x5, y5, x6, y6" alt="find cheap polygons" />
</map>
<img alt="map" src="/myblog/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/img.png" width="420" height="185" usemap="#myMap" />

What this code does is define areas of an image that should be clickable like regular links. Google does crawl these image map links and the alt text does appear in the text only view of the google cache pages so it totally counts as on page content. Users don't see the alt text unless they hover the map rectangles. You could make the 1x1 white background pixels of the upper right corner of your logo image SEO links for tuning outbound relevance and on page keyword densities. Your page looks exactly the same as it always has and its very unlikely that human visitor will ever see an issue.

Another cool Spliff is to add extra divs of content in noscript tags.

 

[peter2002]

@ipopbb

I actually wanted to help the OP with some tips. But you covered the most important things already. Good job!

 

[observer]

guys, tx a lot.
ipopbb, man, you did research for me... really touched me.. thank you...

so, anything else "not to do" in order to get site pick traffic fast?

 

[observer]

oh, wait...

Another cool Spliff is to add extra divs of content in noscript tags.

I need a little babysitting with this as well.... what are the "noscript tags" and how to get it done?

 

[foxler]

I need a little babysitting with this as well.... what are the "noscript tags" and how to get it done?

Read up at: http://javascript.about.com/library/bltut14.htm
It's basically inserting more instances of your targeted keyword into the source code of the page without it actually having to display as text on the page.

 

[jamhall830]

Whats the best way to keep an autoblog from getting deindexed or sandboxed?

 

[ipopbb]

sandboxed is temporary and just about all new websites do their time. It's not to be feared, but expected. Google does it because most people quit in 10 months or less. You self-select yourself out of the SERPs by quitting. It is the main barrier between a newbie and a page 1 result. Expect it and be prepared to not quit when it happens.

You wont get delisted unless you do some very illicit shit. Most people think google is out to get them or that problems in the SERPs means google discovered them and is punishing them. This is almost always not the case. It is very hard to get on the radar of a human being over at google. You don't want to get that far. Breaking laws, click fraud, huge volumes of web spam (200K+ pages), bizarre origin traffic, viruses & malicious code, etc... these things warrant special treatment from Google. Most people stay in 0-human automationland over at Google... it means you just have to tweak what you do to work better with "the system". Sandbox is an automated behavior that is a function of time in the google index database. Delisted is a manual behavior that requires a human.