Tags

Tags play an important role in improving the usability and findability of your web site. AutoBlogged uses tags a number of ways. First, it can pull the tags that the original author set on the feed itself. Second, it can visit the original URL to find additional tags, and finally you can also use the Yahoo! tagging API to extract additional tags.

Note that tag support in WordPress is fairly new so many older themes do not display a post’s tags. You can fix this by modifying the theme itself or finding a plugin such as Simple Tags that will do this for you.

Tag Clouds

Tag clouds are an excellent way to increase relevant keyword density on every page of your web site. WordPress has a sidebar widget to display a tag cloud for the most popular tags on your site. Also consider the Simple Tags plugin for a much more configurable sidebar widget.

When you first add feeds to AutoBlogged and run the script, you might notice that the tag cloud contains tags that are not relevant to your content. However, as time passes and your site content grows, the more relevant tags will appear more frequently and the off-topic tags will fall off the tag cloud.

Using Categories

Although you do want a large number of tags to help search engine ranking, you should be more selective with your use of categories. Use categories as a simple navigational aid on your web site and try not to create more than fifteen primary categories for your site. Every time AutoBlogged processes feeds, it goes through all blog categories to see if they appear in the feed content so a large number of categories will slow down feed processing.

Subcategories

One helpful use for categories is to use them as subcategories to group content into consistent main categories. For example, under a main category you might want to create subcategories for synonyms or alternate terminology.

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Tags: clouds feed content findability keyword density navigational aid off topic search engine synonyms tag support usability wordpress yahoo

Some people ask us if AutoBlogged can rewrite or spin articles to avoid duplicate content penalties when adding posts from other RSS feeds. Although you can do some simple rewriting using the Search and Replace feature it is pretty limited and we generally do not recommend it for other than simple substitutions.

Article spinning is a technique of rewriting words in an article to avoid duplicate content penalties in search engines while maintaining the basic meaning of the article. Most article spinning techniques involve randomly replacing certain words or phrases based on a database of synonyms

We generally do not recommend article spinning. Although the content may look different to a search engine, a human can easily spot a spinned article and sometimes synonyms may produce unexpected results and actually hurt search engine placement. Furthermore, there is a fine line between autoblogging and plagiarizing. Using small content excerpts of someone else’s article to provide added value (as in the case of Google News or Technorati) is generally an accepted (or at least tolerable) practice.

However, spinning someone else’s content to plagiarize and avoid detection can quickly get your site flagged as spam and significantly (and sometimes permanently) penalized in the search engines. Furthermore, article spinning gives autobloggers in general a bad name and many are quick to label all autoblogs as spam sites.

For the most part, autoblogs are not affected by duplicate content penalties, especially if you only use fair excerpts and pull from a variety of sources. In fact, using small excerpts can improve your keyword density which often results in ranking higher than the original articles.

Having said that, if you still wish to avoid duplicate content detection, one tool we recommend is the WP Uniquefier Plugin, which does not affect the readability of an article. WP Spinner is another WordPress plugin, although we have not tested this.

One of the key features of AutoBlogged is its ability to gather tags for each post, thereby increasing relevant keyword density and potentially improving your search engine rankings. There are a number of ways that AutoBlogged collects tags so we thought it would be helpful to better understand how this process works.

Feed Tags
Under the Tag Options admin panel there is an option to Use original tags from feed.

If you have this option checked, AutoBlogged will use SimplePie to extract all categories and tags from the feed item, including any tags found on any attachments. These tags are usually the most relevant because they typically are hand-selected by the author.

Adding Categories
If you edit the settings for a feed, under the Categories section there is an option If unselected blog categories appear in the post content… Add them as post tags. If this is checked, AutoBlogged will look at all the categories in your blog to see if the category text appears anywhere in the post content and will add those categories as tags on the post if they do appear.

For example, in your blog you might have a category called Microsoft Office. Under that you could have the subcategories Excel, Word, Access, and PowerPoint. Although you might have all posts from a feed go to the Microsoft Office category, you could check the Add them as post tags option to add Excel, Word, Access, or PowerPoint as tags on the post if those words appear in the post content.

This feature lets you use your site’s existing categories to improve the quality and relevance of tags on each post.

User-Assigned Tags
For each feed you can add one or more tags that AutoBlogged will randomly add to each post. Under the Tag Options admin panel you can also specify global tags that AutoBlogged will randomly add to posts from all feeds.

If you have certain keywords and phrases that you are targeting with search engines, these are the places to put them. We recommend always using the per-feed or global tags to improve search rankings and to improve the overall quality of tags. In fact, we never build an autoblog without first building a list of keywords using Google’s keyword tool.

Internal Tagging Engine
If you have the Use internal tagging engine to add tags from content option checked, AutoBlogged will visit the orignal URL of the article and try to extract relevant keywords to use as tags. This is useful because most feeds only have a short excerpt but this allows you to pull other important words from the full content. AutoBlogged does this by looking at meta keywords, titles, headings, bold words, rel tags, alt tags, link titles, and extracting phrases based on sentence structure. AutoBlogged will add weights to each of these tags and sort them accordingly.

The internal tagging engine can greatly increase relevant keywords, add long-tail phrases, and overall can improve your search rankings. Overall the tagging engine works quite well, but being an automated process it will sometimes produce sentence fragments that don’t look natural, especially when there isn’t much content in the original article. To improve the results, we have a tags.txt file that contains the most common categories and tags taken from various popular tagging sites. Tags from this file will rank higher if they appear in the article.

Note that the internal tagging engine can be very useful but it also puts more memory and processor load on AutoBlogged than any other feature. If you find that performance is an issue you should disable this feature and instead use the user-assigned tags to improve tagging. Note also that the tagging engine is highly biased towards the English language and you might not get the results you expect with other languages.

Yahoo! API
If you have this option selected and have entered a Yahoo! Application ID, AutoBlogged will then send the page content over to the Yahoo! API to extract additional tags. We have found the Yahoo! API good at identifying the content category but most often the words are too general to be worth the extra processing. In the near future we will have add-ins for other tagging engines as well.

Tag Filtering
Once AutoBlogged builds the tag list from the original content, it combines that list with the feed tags, category tags, and user-defined tags. It then goes through each tag to remove any that match the tags you have set on the Tag Filtering setting under Tag Options. AutoBlogged also loads the notags.txt file which is a series of regular expressions to remove words and phrases that are too general or that don’t work well as tags. At this point it also removes any tags that are tool long or too short based on your Maximum Tag Length and Minimum Tag Length settings.

At this point AutoBlogged probably has a big list of tags so it randomly shuffles them, which gives feed tags, category tags, user-assigned tags, and tags extracted from the content equal importance. It then trims the list based on the setting you have for Maximum Tags per Post, using a random number between that and half that value. In other words if you set a Maximum Tags Per Post setting of 12, it will trim the list to anywhere between 6 and 12 tags. Note that due to the shuffling process you could run the same article through AutoBlogged and get a different list of tags each time.

Our tagging engine is something we have spent considerable time on and we will continue to improve this feature in future versions of AutoBlogged.

RSS Feed Sources

• Configure multiple RSS feed sources with the ability to enable or disable individual feeds.
• Support for RSS 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom 0.3 and 1.0 feeds.
• Integrated feed caching, HTTP Conditional GET support, and support for GZIP-compression to improve performance and reduce bandwidth usage.
• Support for dozens of RSS modules including Dublin Core, GeoRSS, ITunes, Media RSS, RSS 1.0 Content, W3C WGS84 Basic GEO, XML 1.0, and XHTML 1.0.
• Numerous pre-defined searches to locate articles via Google Blog Search, Technorati, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, MSN Spaces, Yahoo! News, Flickr, YouTube, and others.
  
• RSS Feed autodiscovery–if you don’t know the exact feed URL, just enter the page address and AutoBlogged will find it for you.
• Built-in feed viewer to help with setting up and troubleshooting feed sources.
• Ability to override the automatically extracted feed data, such as author or source, with your own static values or values.
• Set the default post status to Published, Pending, Draft, or Private

Feed Processing

• Process feeds automatically using built-in pseudo cron feature so an external scheduler is not required.
• Set a range of intervals for random update scheduling.
• Manually process all feeds or one feed at a time.
• Preview feed processing without importing any posts.
• Disable cron operations without disabling the entire plugin.
• Allow other feeds to notify your autoblog of updates using an XML-RPC ping.
• Configure individual feeds to update every time AutoBlogged runs or after every each number of runs you set.
  
• Include all posts from each feed, set a limit on posts added per feed, or have AutoBlogged select random posts based on a percentage you set.
• Automatically create text-only excerpts based on number of words, sentences, or paragraphs.

Post Filtering

• Domain blacklist blocks posts from certain domains. Excellent way to block sites with spammy content, invalid HTML, or to allow webmasters to exclude their site from your blog.
• Block posts based on any portion of the URL to prevent posts from a specific type of sites such as forums or to block feeds from certain types of software.
• Keyword blacklists to exclude posts that contain keywords you specify.
• Duplicate post checking based on title and/or URL.
• Automatic filtering of malicious content in posts including SQL injection and cross-site scripting.
• Feed-specific filtering based on all words, any words, exact phrase, or none of the words specified.
  
• Feed-specific search and replace features using regular expressions to rewrite words, URLs, fix invalid content, replace affiliate IDs, etc.
• Truncate or filter out posts with long titles.
• Filter out posts where the titles are in all caps or where they contain multiple consecutive exclamation points or other punctuation.

Categories and Tags

• Assign each feed to one or more blog categories or subcategories or have AutoBlogged randomly select from a list of categories you specify.
• Search each post for existing blog categories and add them as additional categories or as tags on the post.
• Visits the original URL to extract additional tags not found in the feed using our own powerful tagging engine–an important SEO feature that will load your blog with related keywords.
  
• Add extra tags using the Yahoo! tagging API.
• Include categories from the original post and add missing categories to your blog if you choose.
• Tag blacklists prevent certain tags from appearing on a post.
• Common tags list increases the frequency of popular tags used by Technorati and other tagging sites or modify the list to add important tags for your niche.
• Provide a list of tags to randomly add to each post to increase the density of long tail phrases and other targeted keywords.
• Set the maximum and minimum tag length to ensure consistency and readability of your tags.
• Set the maximum number of tags to add to any post.

Authors

• Specify the author to use for new posts, assign a rando m author or use the name of the original author.
• If the original author does not exist as an author on your blog, add it, skip the post, randomly pick another author, or specify a default author.

• Use additional author information from your blog when adding new posts.

Post Templates

• Post templates let you randomly select from one or more post formats to ensure variety and to accommodate any number of site requirements.
• Apply different post templates to each of your feeds.
• Insert variables from the post, original feed, or any values you define.
• Random Select Lists to add variety to each post.
• Conditional Select Lists to show alternate fields if one is empty.
• Include images, video, flash and other content in your blog posts using an embedded video players.
• Specify a custom player for playing FLV or MP3 files.
• Build custom post templates to use with affiliate and other non-standard feed formats.
• Include text-only summaries or entire feed content as your post.
• Add custom HTML to each post to include NoFollow tags, Javascript, or even WordPress quick tags.
• Custom fields allow you to create your own post variables and include items as additional custom fields fin Wordpress.
• Automatic image, logo, and favicon extraction.
• Include any elements from the original feed based on dozens of supported RSS modules.
• And of course, you can simply show the original feed content untouched.

WordPress Integration

• Takes advantage of internal tagging and category engines to ensure strong keyword coverage and site navigation.
• Full integration with WordPress security and user permission features.
• Attribute posts to WordPress authors when incoming posts use that author’s name.
• Uses site information from WordPress blogroll when that site already exists in your blogroll.
• Automatically adds fields for images, videos, and thumbnails to support a variety of premium themes.

Other Features

• Set the HTTP Referer and User-Agent strings to use when visiting the original sites to advertise your site or provide opt-out instructions or contact info to other webmasters.
• Huge speed and performance improvements over previous versions.
• Commented PHP source code included.
• Support forum and e-mail support for all registered users.
• Free minor version updates included.

System Requirements

• PHP v4.3.2 or later
• WordPress v2.5 or later
• SimplePie Core Plugin v1.1 or later
• PHP cURL extension required
• PHP Zlib extension recommended

Note that servers with safe_mode enabled or an open_basedir set will have reduced image retrieval and tagging capabilities.

Autoblogging is the term we use to automatically create content for blogs, as opposed to manually writing individual posts. In the case of AutoBlogged, you can create posts based on the contents of another RSS feed. Since you can get RSS feeds on just about anything, you can easily find content to automatically add to your WordPress blog. For example, you could get a feed from Google Blog Search that returns articles written by other bloggers on a particular topic. These articles will appear on your blog as short excerpts with a link attributing the original source.

Technorati.com and Google News are both examples of essentially how an autoblog looks.

Autoblogs are useful for many things, but they are a great way to aggregate articles on a particular niche topic for your blog. By pulling feeds from multiple sources and using smart searches and filtering you can provide valuable portals to your niche topic. Autoblogs can also work well to build blogs from multiple affiliate feeds or to augment your own content.

Autoblogs ensure keyword-rich, fresh content that will greatly improve your search engine results.

Are Autoblogs the Same as Splogs?

While many people do use autoblogs as spam blogs–or splogs–autoblogging itself is not spamming. Splogs are spam in the sense that they are spamming search engines to build backlinks or drive traffic to affiliate links, increase ptc ad clicks, or even to spread malware. Splogs quickly get blacklisted on search engines and work based on volume and rapidly creating new splogs. Splogs are a blackhat SEO technique that do not produce quality long-term results and are generally annoying for anyone using a search engine.

Are Autoblogs the Same as Scrapers?

Scraping is similar to autoblogging in the sense that it uses content from other web sites. Scraping, however, is different in that it uses a significant amount of content from targeted sites and often is combined with rewriting techniques to obscure the original content while maintaining the topical context.

Autoblogging is not about stealing content, but rather sifting through, aggregating, and linking to the world’s content to create added value.

We have encountered a bug that causes AutoBlogged to terminate unexpectedly when trying to create a thumbnail for an image. When creating thumbnails, AutoBlogged calls the WordPress function image_resize which in turn calls wp_load_image which in turn calls the PHP function imagecreatefromstring. All of these functions have proper error handling code, however there is a bug that sometimes causes imagecreatefromstring to halt with a segmentation fault when processing an invalid image.

We do not know the exact details of when and where the problem occurs, but we do know that a number of bugs have been reported related to segmentation faults with imagecreatefromstring. Note that the problem occurs due to an error while processing an image which could mean an invalid image or some other problem. The image may display fine in your browser yet could still be causing the segfault in the GD library.

Unfortunately, being a PHP bug there is nothing we can do to fix this error and because it is a fatal error we cannot just catch it and move on. All we can do is recommend that you check your PHP version to make sure you have the latest release. Otherwise, the only other solution is if you encounter this is to manually skip the post with the invalid image file using the Filtering options to create a URL blacklist or Keyword blacklist entry.

Fortunately this problem is quite rare but we did want to document the issue.

AutoBlogged is a powerful autoblogging plugin for WordPress that automatically creates blog posts from any RSS or Atom feed. Autoblogging is a great way to automate your WordPress posts so you can focus your efforts on earning money with your blog. With dozens of features, AutoBlogged is one of the most powerful autoblog software plugins available for WordPress and the best way to get automated blog content.

Features:

• Image and video support
• Custom post templates
• Advanced post filtering
• Enhanced tagging engine
• Regular Expression Search & Replace
• Create thumbnails for images
• Override feed data with your own values
• Fully supports WordPress 2.7 and later
• See AutoBlogged’s features

Furthermore, we have added a comprehensive online help, e-mail support, and customer forums to make sure you can quickly and easily get started autoblogging in WordPress! You can use AutoBlogged to build a blog network, as an automated video blog, to create topic portals, or aggregate RSS feeds. WP Autoblogs are a great way to quickly build keyword-dense content, earn money with your blog, and fully automate your blog posting. Even better, automated blog content is an excellent alternative to domain parking. Rather than showing a generic parked page with spammy-looking ads, you can provide real content, get indexed in search engines, build page rank, and generate traffic. You will be amazed how fast your domain value will grow!

Screenshots

More AutoBlogged screenshots…

The Feed Settings page allows you to individually configure and customize each source feed. From this page you can configure settings such as the category, tagging, filtering, and post templates.

General Settings

• Enabled – Determines whether the feed is included in each script run. Use this to temporarily disable a feed for testing or during feed configuration.
• Feed Type – This setting allows you to use one of the built-in handlers for various search engines. These handlers allow you to quickly configure a search without having to figure out the feed URL for the particular search engine.
• Search Keywords or RSS Feed URL – When using an RSS feed use this box to enter the full path to the feed. If using one of the built-in search handlers use this box to enter keywords or tags for your search. Note that if you do not have the exact feed URL you can often enter the web site’s main page and AutoBlogged will attempt to discover the actual feed URL.
• Title – The title is there for your own use to label the feed. This title will only show on the Feeds management page. IF you do not enter a title, the Feeds page will create a title for you.Default Status – When adding new posts from a feed, you can choose to have them automatically published, saved as a draft, saved as a private post, or with a status of pending.

Categories and Tags

• Assign posts to this category – All posts created from a feed must be assigned to at least one category. This setting determines the category for all posts in this feed.
• If other blog categories appear in the post - When processing a feed, AutoBlogged will check to see if any of the existing blog categories appear in the post. If they do, you can choose to 1) assign those categories to the post and 2) add those categories as tags for the post. This feature is particularly useful if your blog has categories with subcategories. You can assign the feed to the main category and let AutoBlogged automatically add the subcategories if found. For example, you may have a blog category titled Windows with subcategories XP and Vista. You can assign the category Windows to the feed and allow it to automatically assign the categories XP or Vista if those words appear in the post. This feature can add true value to your blog by intelligently gathering and categorizing content found on the web.
• Additional Tags – With an autoblog that does nothing more than show excerpts and point to other sites your site offers little value for users and little uniqueness for search engines. The Additional Tags feature allows you to create a list of keywords, phrases, or search terms that will randomly be added as tags to each post. Not only does this improve your search engine results, it helps users to find relevant content based on the additional keywords you provide.

Include Posts that Contain

This section allows you to perform additional keyword filtering on your feed when the source does not provide such a feature. For example, you may be using an affiliate feed and only want to display those posts that contain the keyword coupon.

Note that any extra processing you perform will affect the load, overhead, and speed of the script. If possible try to use any filtering capabilities of the source feed before using the feed-level filtering.

All of these searches are performed on each field extracted from the feed, it does not do any filtering based on the content of the original page.

Enter lists of words separated by spaces or commas. To enter a phrase that includes spaces or commas, enclose that phrase in quotes.

• All these words - All words in this box must appear in the feed in order for the post to pass filtering checks.
• Any of these words - If any of the listed words appear, the post will pass filtering checks.
• The exact phrase - If the exact phrase appears in the post, it will pass filtering checks. Note that if you would like to enter multiple phrases in this box, each phrase must be enclosed in quotes.
• None of these words - If any of these words appear in the post it will not pass the filter checks.

Custom Fields

Custom Fields are a power feature that allow you to override field values, supply values for empty fields, or create new fields that you can use as variables in templates. For example, you may have a feed where all authors show as Admin, which is fairly common with blogs. If you know the author’s real name, you can create a custom field named author and enter the name of the author you wish to use.

All custom fields will also override extracted values or will be added as additional fields to the WordPress post so you can modify your WordPress theme to display these values.

Note that Custom Fields are processed before Post Templates and therefore the fields you create can be referred to from within your templates.

• Custom Field – This is the name of the field you wish to set.
• Custom Field Value – This is the value you wish to assign to the field. This can be a static value or you can use the post template syntax to create more complex scenarios.

Post Templates

Post Templates are the key to customizing your blog and giving it a fresh and natural appearance. Post Templates have a flexible syntax that allows for random selections, conditional content, variable insertion, and loops. For more information on Post Templates, see Post Template Reference

Search and Replace

The Search and Replace feature allows you to modify the content of a feed based on Regular Expression searches. With this feature you can do things such as rewrite words, enforce naming standards, insert affiliate ID’s, correct non-standard feeds, create unique content, or just about anything else you can imagine. Search and Replace uses the PCRE syntax.

• Search for – The search term or regular expression to find.
• Replace with – The expression to use for replacing the search term.

Note that the Search and Replace feature uses Regular Expressions so you must escaoe any special characters in your search pattern with a slash (\) character. The special characters that need escaping are \^.$|()[].

For example, if you want to seach for autoblogged.com and replace it with www.autoblogged.com, you would use these values:
Search for: autoblogged\.com
Replace with: www.autoblogged.com

If you want to turn all instances of wikipedia.com into a hyperlink, use these values:
Search for: wikipedia\.com
Replace with: <a href=”wikipedia.com”>wikipedia.com</a>

Note that if your search expression contains multiple grouped matches, the Replace operation will only be performed on the primary match. For more precise control over replacement, you can use backreferences in your replace expression.

AutoBlogged can automatically identify tags from the original article based on frequency, importance, sentence structure, HTML formatting, and other factors. The purpose of this is to identify relevant and natural keywords and phrases that the author did not include as tags. This is important for search engine results and also to assist visitors in finding the content of your site.

The tagging engine will quickly fill your blog pages with relevant keywords that will help your site dominate the search engines for your topic.

Although the internal tagging engine is quite effective in most cases, it is still just a script and could never accomplish what a human could. Often you will encounter keyword phrases that are not relevant, consist of sentence framgents, or simply do not make sense.

Although you might want to manually delete tags that detract from your content, you should also consider that a search engine will see the tags differntly than a human would. Often those sentence fragments will help to make your content unique and will help to diversify your page content while still keeping it on topic. It is not uncommon to find that some tags you would normally delete turn out to be the ones that bring in the most search engine traffic.

For example, you might have a blog that covers topics related to Microsoft Windows. Invariable you will pick up tags related to Linux operating systems, or software that is only relevant because it runs on Windows. These tags might turn out to be extremely helpful in search engine positions due to the unique mix of words.

General Settings

• Minimum Tag Length - The is the minimum number of characters a word must contain before it can be used as a tag.
• Maximum Tag Length - This is the maximum number of characters a word can contain to be allowed as a tag.
• Maximum Tags per Post – To prevent from adding too many tags to a post, you can limit that maximum tags per post with this setting.

Additional Tags

With an autoblog that does nothing more than show excerpts and point to other sites your site offers little value for users and little uniqueness for search engines. The Additional Tags feature allows you to create a list of keywords, phrases, or search terms that will randomly be added as tags to each post. Not only does this improve your search engine results, it helps users to find relevant content based on the additional keywords you provide.

Note that this list is global for all feeds. You can also add tags individually to each feed using this setting.

Tag Filtering

Although the internal keyword extraction engine is quite accurate, because it is still a script some tags may appear too frequently, are not relevant, or simply do not make sense. You can use this setting to block certain tags.

Note that this setting will only block new tags from appearing but it will not remove any existing unwanted tags on your posts.