Heaven is within you; Hell is just what's leftover. Share the Love you know and feel with others. http://robertworstell.com/lifestyle-choice/not-just-board-game-live-others-order-improve-your-own-life/

World's Worst President

Obama hits new low

Splogs, Robo-blogs, and Article Directories - pick your poison

The question was raised recently about one of the remote blogs I was operating. The reader said it might be a robo-blog, but wondered, since the quality of the posts was very high.

And that is really what the difference between a splog, a robo-blog, and a remote blog is: quality of content.

Splogs are spam blogs and simply put the same content out over and over. 

Robo-blogs are low-quality posts which are not identical to other blogs, but are only modified enough to "fool" the search engines. (Which are noone's fools and actually penalize such blogs the same.)

True remote blogs contribute to the community they are found in and are nearly indistinguishable from other main or principle blogs they link to and support.

The trick is how to pull this off. You don't want to spend  your life creating original content for all these blogs. Or simply make too-numerous alterations so that each post appears "original".

There are several points to approach this with:

1. Use a high-quality article spinner to turn out alternate renditions of each major blog post from your main blog.
2. Create personal pages on each remote blogs and identities (aliases) which show real care.
3. Keep each remote blog specific to a single line of content and not a lot of disrelated posts for various affiliate products. 
4. Ensure each remote blog also links out to relevant content across the blogsphere and the web to assist others with their own rankings - paying it forward in advance, providing service just as your "main" blog does.
5. Get a post creation and tracking system which won't kill you off from tedious over-work.

And since the get-rich-quick guys won't do all the hard, detailed work above, they only creat splogs - or at best, robo-blogs.

The overall point is to create versions of posts, and treat each remote blog as you would an article directory. But unless you want to create an article directory from a blog (and this is possible with self-hosted Wordpress now) you want to keep to a single, defined category of interest so that your remote blog becomes another trusted authority to the search engines - and even competes with your main blog. (I've seen some of my remote blogs rank higher than my main blog at times - which is fine, since it also links to any affiliate product I'm supporting, and my own book sales.)

Essentially, then, you are just continuing the "conversation domination" techniques. The same as if you created Weebly sites, Squidoo lenses, or post your blog articles to Zimbio, post presentations of that same material to Slideshare, record podcasts and host on Archive.org, or make videos and post through Tube Mogul or PixelPipe.

But if you try to take the quick route - you wind up penalizing your main blog and wiping out its standings.

Your choice of poison.

- - - -

Oh - you might have seen that if you take our excellent content and have a quality article spinner to run it through, you can also post it to numerous article directories - or unique versions of it, any way. Write once, publish many times and ways... Check out your blog production flow and see if this might not make it more efficient.

SOHO Man - Small Business Blog: How to Use Google Queries to Find Backlink-Friendly Sites

Thought you'd like this one: How to simply and easily find places on the Internet who actually want you to add an incoming link to your site. Like even Squidoo...

Another trick involves Squidoo.com and their system of establishing lists. Go to Google and do this search:

“add+to+this+list”+”keyword phrase”+site:squidoo.com

This search query will pull up a list of Squidoo.com pages (many with good pageranks) that allow you to add your site to their list, and, in many cases, even choose your own link text.

SOHO Man - Small Business Blog: How to Use Google Queries to Find Backlink-Friendly Sites

Getting a Blogroll from Blog Desk to Blogger to Wordpress

Situation: Had a ton of links and blogs but didn't want to spend the time laboriously copy/pasting them into Wordpress.

Before, the solution was to create a page full of links when I was reviving an old wordpress blog I'd exported.

Did some homework this time.

Found a nice how-to over at Blogger-in-Draft, which tells you how to get them exported out of Google Reader.

So a simple work-around was to open each one of them up in Firefox, then subscribe to the feed in Google Reader. That way, I had all my feeds in one place.

Then I followed their instructions and had this nice OPML file which imported just dandy.

Trouble was - it sent everyone to my shared Google Reader folder where the RSS feeds were kept.

I wanted to actually give hard links on the other site pages so that the Search Engines would share the link love.

So: more research.

Found this nice on-page script that ran just great in order to turn HTML to OPML. Because was was interesting is that this list showed up as links in html, but would send the browser over to Google Reader instead. Well, at least one version I found after I'd imported it into WP.

Solution: This meant I scraped the page of links and then pasted it into a new OpenOffice HTML document, saved it and viewed the source.

Pasting this source into that last linked script gave me a workable blogroll (finally.)

But it's great to be able to take 35 links at one pop and import them back into all those blogs so they could share the wealth with each other. One quick import and I was done.

Recipe:

1. Subscribe to all the RSS feeds through Firefox.
2. Convert your Google Reader feeds to OPML.
3. Import once into a WP blog.
4. Scrape this and paste into OpenOffice to get an HTML doc.
5. Convert HTML doc to OPML and test import. (Tweak in text editor to taste.)
6. Import into all the WP blogs you want to, via their Import function (under Tools in 2.9)

And having gone through that, I'm sharing it with you.