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.