My first autoblog.. almost set up... yay.. just need a little help though..

Hey fellas, I've almost set up my first autoblog with about 2222 posts in 2.5 years.. mostly thanks to DeaTHReQueST and earnesthemingway.. here's the link hxxp:// hxsh .net. Any comments or feedbacks would be really appreciated.. I have, however a few doubts and would really appreciate your help and hope this may help some intermediate newbies like me..

* I still haven't figured how out how to get those cron-job thing to work for the caffeinated content plugin (there was an option for it in wp-o-matic although I'm not sure I was able to figure out that one either)...

* Are the ad placement right. I mean do they blend in or not. If yes, do they blend in way too much for google to get pissed off(I've seen peeps at google forum crying their heart out about getting banned because as google put it "their ads blended too well to be differentiable from content")...

* I just saw a thread about HG banning a guys account because of the autoblog thing.. So I would host like a max of 5-6 blogs in future per hosting account but just to be safe is there any way to export the whole blog with all settings and posts and plugins.. just in case so I have a backup??

* I don't know what this webmaster .google .com thing is? but I did submit my sitemap to it and I got this error..
"Paths don't match
We've detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that includes the www prefix (for instance, http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml). However, the URLs listed inside your Sitemap don't use the www prefix (for instance, http://example.com/myfile.htm)."

Any help??

* I used this plugin "All in One SEO Plugin" and filled out all the info.. so how effective are things like these??

* I used this plugin "Google Analytics" for worpress and it said it would fill out the required code automatically and just needed me to fill in the web property ID(the UA-xxxxxxxx-x thingy)... I filled it out but I'm still getting the status as "tracking unknown" in GA...

* I haven't had time to check out any traffic driving method for the site but I was thinking about using reddit for now and mayve using adbrite PPV campaign with lowest CPV bid($0.001) as soon as I actually get some money... Are these methods effective or should I keep looking for some better methods here at BHW..(If you could point to a specific thread I'd really be thankful )

* How to get my site listed on google, yahoo.. I'm not talking about getting it ranked higher but to actually getting it considered to be displayed.. I mean how do I submit to search engines... There seem to be some free auto-submitter sites but I'm not sure if I should use them.. I mean there are guys at DP charging 4-5 bucks for same services..


Please don't mind if my English seems a bit off.. It's not my native language and I'm a bit high right now


Edit: some more questions..
what are these pings/pigbacks/pinglist thingy.. from what I can see they are used to notify search engines about changes in the blog.. correct??


Also I'm facing a lot of problems with google webmasters tools right now.. the error I mentioned earlier about "www" missing is still unresolved. Now, I can't get them to re-download my robots.txt(I think this may be the main reason for the problem...).. The google is using the same robots.txt it downloaded 22 hrs ago and I can't find an option to update it... help??


Also, I really need answer to my question about submitting my site to google and yahoo to be considered in listing.. any help would be really appreiciated..


This one is kinda off-topic but I was just curious.. and it does not seem big enough to create a separate thread about it.. What does it mean when something goes "Viral".. like twitter has gone viral or this method can get viral.. I thought it meant being "automatizable"...

 

Nice website, try getting some backlinks, get your PR up.

 

Thanks.. I think I bought an ebook at DP about getting PR high.. well, time to read it now.. and if it seems good enough share it here too....

 

As for Google Analytics, go over to the settings in your G account and set the default URL (I.E Index.php) and it will work.

 

Hi mate, you need a sitemap and a Private Policy plugin to risk not getting banned with Adsense.

I'd recommend these 2 which I use... GL.

Code:

http://www.synclastic.com/plugins/privacy-policy/
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

 

Yeah, I was thinking about doing the same.. but the plugin seems to need only my ID for that (UA-XXXXXXXX-X).. and it offers stats for every page which I thought was very cool... So hope that plugin works well... or well.. I'll just put the code in index.php and live with it..

thanks a lot dude... I already used the sitemap generator and have generated the sitemap check it out... hxsh .net/sitemap and hxsh .net/sitemap.xml
and the privacy policy plugin seems really awesome... here'e "my" policy hxsh .net/privacy-policy

 

I am going to suggest something that you are not going to want to do. You need to start viewing the source on your pages and looking at the php files of your theme to try and understand what is happening behind the scenes. You can look at the footer when you view source to see if tracking is there or not, and if the plugin is not inserting it, you can insert it yourself on footer.php. That would save you a plugin and some cpu time on the server as well. Learn a tiny amount of php and it will benefit you in future endeavors when you want to do something complicated. Also, read as much as you can in the blogging forum here on bhw and at some point things will start to suddenly make sense. Search on google about SEO also and google

Code:

m a t t  c ut t s

and watch some of his videos and read the comments. I hope I didn't sound like a dick If I did, I will argue that it is still good advice

 

well.. that't not really being a dick .. That would like saying "Y0! what the f*** are you trying to say. Is that even English.... Get out of here and go take a crap at DP or something" ... seriously now, I'm not a PHP expert but I know enough to insert and tweak codes wee bit to suit my needs.. It's just the wordpress plugins are so awesome and easy that I just didn't feel like editing the code myself... oh well... time to get to work then .. Thanks

About SEO yeah, I was watching some tutorials from www. lynda .com they seem good but I'll have a peek at matt cutts.

 

Your english is actually great btw I agree plugins are the bomb and do all sorts of things that would take me days to figure out how to implement. One thing I have come to realize that as long as I am using plugins I am doing things that thousands of others are doing already, learning some php has really changed the game for me and I have implemented some original stuff that I would have been saying wtf to 6 months ago if I saw it on someone else's site PHP will become your best friend, think of something that would be awesome if you could do it and then just start hacking away at it and google searching your ass off until it works. You will be building custom scrapers and all sorts of crazy programs in no time

 

Nice blog... here are my suggestions...
1) Check Settings / General and make sure both URL's are correct assuming you want www, make it so that it reads http://www.yourdomain.com...
2) Add the code below to your htaccess to force www...

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Regards...

 

Thanks dude... Well time to learn some more PHP now.. At least the first thing I wanna do is learn to add the
<!? google_ad_section_start ?> and
<!? google_ad_section_end ?> in every post and maybe add an ad just below the title.. ... A small bit of code editing I'm sure, but let's start with that... will update here if I succeed/fail..

DUDE.. I don't know if you intended to, but you just solved my sitemap problem.. I mean it was finally submitted to google without any errors
thanks a lot man..

 

Update: That damn plugin "syncontent" messes up ALL of my 2k posts dammit.. I might have accidently turned it off(Probably when I was trying to turn sociable off; they are right next to each other and I wanted to turn it off to see if I can display the whole "share and enjoy" thing without using the plugin but the icons started getting displayed as a list under each other after the.. probably moving the CSS out of the plugin folder might work.. meh.. who cares)

I was trying to sort out the CSS thing when I noticed none of the posts made any sense... well had to spend next hour and a half fetching all posts back again after deleting them...gurrrrr...

Anyways I learned how to add header and footer (I dunno the right term)... and added the adsense and the <!? google_ad_section_start ?>... at least the ads are now related to halloween and not wordpress...phew

But I gotta say, doing it through PHP took maybe more time but I guess it was way easier than trying to figure out all the options of a plugin .. Thanks a lot Dichotom



Advice: IF YOU'RE READING THIS...DO NOT USE SYNCONTENT... IT WILL BLOW UP IN YOUR FACE AND THEN GO AROUND TO BITE YOU IN THE ASS.. TRUST ME

 

If you run into problems post here and I will help with whatever I can. I can definitely help with putting an ad right under the title on every post page, that is a quick edit in your theme's single page php file (diff names on diff themes) the other sounds like a shortcode for a plugin, if you end up having to insert manually you may try ez adsense or something like that.

 

Thanks man.. I think I need a little help..
Here's the code I put at the end of functions.php file

Code:

function insertFootNote($content) {
if(!is_feed() && !is_home()) {
$content = '<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-xxx";
/* 468x60, created 12/10/09 */
google_ad_slot = "2987538875";
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script><br /><br />'.$content;
$content = $content.'<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-xxx";
/* 468x60, created 12/10/09 */
google_ad_slot = "2337734227";
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>';
}
if(!is_feed()) {
$content = "<!-- google_ad_section_start -->".$content;
$content = $content."<!-- google_ad_section_end -->";
}
return $content;
}
add_filter ('the_content', 'insertFootNote');

I had to work with two conditions here because I want the ads to be displayed as 2 links and 2 text on post, and 1 link and 1 text in the widget bar.. So if I just put in "if(!is_feed())" it would try to put ads in all of the posts leaving widget bar blank (since the max. Google allows is 3 links and 3 texts).. So I had to put another check "if(!is_home())" to avoid putting the two text ads on the homepage..


But the <!-- google_ad_section_start/end --> needs to to be everywhere including the mainpage.. So I just put it in a different IF block..


My question is.. Is there any way for putting the adsense only in the first post in home and leave the other posts ads-free to allow the widgets ads to be displayed..? One possible solution may be to create an extra variable with contains only the first post and modify it to add adsense and then put that code in "if(is_home())" check... But I have a feeling that may be a longer way of doing things..


On a different note though.. the text ads displayed on the top and bottom of the posts have a grey 1px border which I really don't like.. The property seems to be inherited from a really long named CSS on google server.. My question is I can probably override those settings by putting another CSS rule on my files.. but would Google be pissed off??.. because it doesn't really seem to like people who try to mess with their ads layout..

 

yeah, if you type into your browser http://yourdomain.com it should automatically change it to http://www.yourdomain.com keeps it the same throughout...

regards...

 

some good advice here.. you have a lot of research to do and many things to learn, because you cannot expect to apply solutions given by others and risk not understanding the consequences.

your site does not have a PR figure associated yet, although Google might have started crawling it if you managed to configure the sitemap properly. just my 2c - deactivate google analytics for now - your bounce rate is huge, time on page is probably low and this will hurt PR building (will take longer to benefit from your backlinks). if you really want to monitor traffic and page behavior, install Piwik or a similar tool and do it yourself. You might also want to try and reduce the number of plugins active in your WP - they consume CPU cycles, bandwidth and can be the reason for impredictible results.
Apologies if this sounds like gibberish to you - you really need to work on your SEO and webmaster skills. GL!

 

Thanks for the head's up.. and yeah the bounce is pretty high.. about 68%.. and that's including me and you guys who are looking to review and check for any mistakes.. So the real rate might be actually greater than 85%.. I didn't realize Google would analyze the data from analytics.. But I suppose it was kinda obvious and really stupid of me not to think of it..

And well I really don't need any traffic analyzer for now.. I can see the server awstats if I need to...

I'm in the process of learning enough to minimize the plugin dependence except for the necessary ones like Akismet or sitemap generator etc.. So far I've just managed to put ads in the beginning and end of every post.. (I'm using easy adsense plugin too, but it couldn't put ads between the title and post which many said is the most important and a very high CTR position).... The HTML code doesn't doesn't come out as clean and formatted as the one with the plugin but who cares... I can live with that:cow_yello

 

were there any questions not addressed?

 

Most of the questions were answered.. just these four remain..

* I haven't had time to check out any traffic driving method for the site but I was thinking about using reddit for now and mayve using adbrite PPV campaign with lowest CPV bid($0.001) as soon as I actually get some money... Are these methods effective or should I keep looking for some better methods here at BHW..(If you could point to a specific thread I'd really be thankful )

* what are these pings/pigbacks/pinglist thingy.. from what I can see they are used to notify search engines about changes in the blog.. correct??

* this post

* I think the ads blend decently with the content but do they blend in way too much for google to get pissed off(I've seen peeps at google forum crying their heart out about getting banned because as google put it "their ads blended too well to be differentiable from content")...


I just copy-pasted most of the part...

 

I like to use twitter to drive extra traffic to my website. I create a twitter account for each new autoblog, and I have each post, when it goes live, announce itself with title and link to that twitter account.

I use twitter friend finder (offered somewhere here on BHW) to follow people who have my keywords associated with them. You can only add 500 a day so I might do this two days in a row if there are allow of people to add, otherwise I just do it once, get about 45-40 followers, and then let the account post and accrue new followers naturally.

Honestly I'm not too sure of their value... I know that they are attempts to get your site indexed quickly(er), but I do not have trouble with getting indexed really. Webmaster Tools and Google Sitemap Generator for WP takes care of this fast enough. But don't get me wrong. I use max ping optimizer and a fat list of websites to ping anyway, cause the practice seems standard.

I've never heard of this happening. Those guys prob did something that really turned off the employee who was manually reviewing. If you do not think you are misleading, then you should be ok. If you are misleading, and your website overall doesn't serve the internet like allot of your typical autoblogs, then you might not win love, and without love you might just have a ban happy enemy. So make sure your blog is pretty and provides a seeming service and I garuntee you will not have any trouble from Google. If you do, then adjust.