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

Issue
This error is caused when you use the WordPress upload feature to install a plugin from the Add New plugin page. Unfortunately, this feature cannot handle a zip file that contains folders so it places the files in a subdirectory where WordPress cannot see the plugin header files to activate the plugin.

For example, the autoblogged.php file would be installed in a directory like this:
/wp-content/plugins/2.xx/autoblogged/autoblogged.php

Background
Since WordPress v2.8, there has been a feature to upload and install new plugins directly through the WordPress admin back-end by browsing for them on your local hard drive. WordPress will upload the zip file, extract it to the /plugins directory, and then try to activate the plugin. The problem is that since the AutoBlogged zip file contains the plugin files in a subdirectory, WordPress will create one directory with the name of the zip file and then the /autoblogged directory under that. Since that places the plugin file two directories deep, WordPress cannot find it and reports an invalid header. This same problem occurs with any plugin that uses subdirectories in the zip file, and there are many that do.

Solution
To correctly install AutoBlogged, you should use FTP or your hosting control panel’s file manager to upload the autoblogged directory directly under the wp-content/plugins directory. In other words, the full path to autoblogged.php should be:
/wp-content/plugins/autoblogged/autoblogged.php

If you have already used the WordPress upload feature to upload the plugin, you can fix it by moving the /autoblogged directory directly under the /wp-content/plugins directory.

Comments
Obviously, we could fix this ourselves by placing all the files in the zip file without any subfolders, which we tried for a short time, but then found that many users were confused about where to put the files when uploading them via ftp. By zipping them into the autoblogged directory it is pretty intuitive to upload that entire /autoblogged directory to the plugins directory in WordPress. Another benefit is that it allows us to place other files in our zip file that don’t need to be uploaded to your server.

We personally consider this to be a WordPress issue. One solution would be for them to recognize that zip files might actually contain subdirectories and unzip the files accordingly. Another solution would be to allow WordPress to activate plugins that are one or more directories deep under the /plugins directory. And of course, they really should fix their error message saying that our plugin header is invalid when in fact they just can’t find the file that they uploaded to the wrong place.

See Also:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/280262

http://ijstyles.com/wordpress-2-8-issues-how-to-solve-plugin-does-not-have-a-valid-header/

http://wordpress.org/search/%22The+plugin+does+not+have+a+valid+header%22?forums=1

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.

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…

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.

Duplicate Posts

• Duplicate Filtering – To prevent duplicates articles from appearing in your blog, AutoBlogged can check for existing articles based on the title or the original URL. The options you choose depends on the type of feeds you are using. Some feeds, such as Flickr feeds, often have duplicate titles for different pictures so you may not want to use the title for duplicate checking. Other times you may have multiple sites that syndicate the same articles. In those cases you might want to check for duplicates based on both the title and the link URL.

Blacklists

• URL Blacklists – You can use this setting to prevent adding feeds from certain domains or based on any portion of the URL. When AutoBlogged processes feeds it compares the URL to all items in the URL blacklist. If any of the blacklisted URL sequences appear in the original link it will skip that post.
• Keywords Blacklists – This setting is to keep your blog clean and on topic by blocking any posts that contain certain words. You can use this to block spam content or to prevent certain types of content, such as forum posts, from appearing on your blog. Note that unlike feed-level filters, the Keywords Blacklist is compared against the original content if available.

If you don’t want to read the entire documentation, below is a quick guide for setting up a simple topic portal blog. Before getting started, make sure you have the latest version of WordPress installed and working properly. You may find their Getting Started Guide helpful.

If you plan on using other plugins, you might first want to wait until you get AutoBlogged working properly to ensure there are no conflicts.

Configuring WordPress

There are a few basic things you need to do to get a minimal blog up and running. You will want to select a theme and fine-tune the settings for your blog. For this demonstration, however, we will just need to edit the default category.

From the admin area of your blog (usually located at http://yoursite.com/wp-admin), click on Manage, then on Categories. Now click on the default category and rename it to something that relates to your topic. Also create any extra categories you might want for you blog.

Installing AutoBlogged

To install the AutoBlogged plugin, extract the contents of the download file and upload the entire autoblogged directory to the /wp-content/plugins directory on your web host.

Note that AutoBlogged will attempt to set permissions on the /cache directory to 666. If that setting does not work, you may have to use chmod 777, which may pose a security risk. If you have trouble with this step, please contact your web hosting provider.

From the WordPress admin area, click on the Plugins menu, find AutoBlogged on the list and click on the link to enable the plugin.

Configuring AutoBlogged

1. Click on the Settings menu and then click on the AutoBlogged submenu
2. Click on the Add new feed link.
3. From the Feed Type list, select Google Blog Search.
4. In the Search Keywords box, enter the search terms you want for your subject.
5. Scroll down to the Categories and Tags section and select a default category for all posts from this feed.
6. Scroll down and click on Save Changes.
7. On the upper-left portion of the page, click on the Run Script Now link to test your settings and perform the first script run.

If the script runs correctly, you are finished. The script will automatically check for new posts every 1-3 hours.

What To Do Next

• Add more feeds
• Identify common search terms and long-tail phrases using tools such as Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. Add these in the Additional Tags option on the Tag Options screen.
• Review existing posts to see the tags collected and if you see any you don’t want, delete them and add them to the Tag Filtering box on the Tag Options screen.

AutoBlogged is a WordPress plugin that automatically builds content in your WordPress blog using one or more external RSS or Atom feeds. AutoBlogged is a fast yet powerful tool for building a wide variety of web sites, such as portals, news aggregators, topic watchers, popular article finder, autoblog gallery, or simply an alternative for domain parking.

Getting Started with AutoBlogged

Configuration and Usage

• Main Page
• Edit Feeds Page
• Tag Options Page
• Settings Page
• Filtering Page

Advanced Topics

• AutoBlogged Tagging Engine
• Working with Tags and Categories
• Post Template Reference