I have recently been messing around with what some would call “AutoBlogs”. I don’t exactly like the term autoblog, simply because it carries some negative connotations that you are stealing others content. But there is plenty of ways out there to automate content nowadays, that is not ripping off the original creator. One of the biggest methods floating around at the moment is using Datafeeds from places like Commission Junction, That automate pushing content to your blog. I don’t want to get too involved in what that entails, you can read a pretty good overview here : http://www.ppc.bz/get-money-get-paid/datafeeds-autoblogs-and-forums-oh-my (And yes, I know, PPC.bz isn’t exactly marketing central, but it is an OK read).
Now something that alot of people seem to overlook, is how Google is going to index all these pages and pages of content. It isn’t like this blog, where I push out a post once every few days, and so Google can easily keep up. When you first push an autoblog, it could get hundreds, sometimes thousands of posts at once. And there is no way of google getting to those pages at the very back of your blog.
You have two options, Either you build links to those back pages, to try and get them indexed. Aka waste lots of time.
You install a wordpress paging system, that allows Google to follow links directly to deep pages. Aka save hours of time.
What is a paging system? If you look at the bottom of this page, there is a link called “Previous” that takes you to the next page of posts. If Google had just found my blog, to get to the back pages. It would need to follow this one link, over and over again. Going one page at a time. Infact, I know Google does this. After I wrote my last post about Tracking Google Spiders, I watched Google go from the homepage, crawl all those posts, go to second page, crawl all those posts, and etc. It went one page at a time!
But luckily, you can get plugins (Or in my case, custom coding). That will create page navigation that gives a spider the ability to jump right to the end posts, and anywhere inbetween.
One of the more popular plugins is WordPress Page Navi : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/screenshots/
I linked to the Screenshot page so you can see exactly what I mean. The plugin allows Google to instantly go deep into your posts, instead of going back one page at a time. And does it work? You betcha. I instantly saw a change in how Google (And Yahoo actually) crawled my pages. Often going several pages deep right from the get go. Infact, Google has not left my site since I implemented this function. It seems now that Google is now super keen to see what else I have to offer.
I would give out my Custom coded one. But in all reality, It is a bit messy, and requires editing a bit of PHP to get things working. It is much easier to install a plugin.
O and before anyone asks. I would still recommend installing this on any blog, even if Google has crawled every page from Day 1. There is not really any downsides to giving Google easy access to your content, right?
