n00bie Challenge

Status
Not open for further replies.
couple questions, this are noob questions, I just got a full time job and can't spend time here in the day so sorry if these questions are repeated.

what's the difference between cycle sites and autoblogging? I understand cycle sites pretty well, as I read 20 pages on Cycle Sites on squirt's forum last sunday. Not sure how cycle sites are different from autoblogging as they sound like the same thing.

With autoblogging, can you limit how many posts are made a day? I don't really want to start cycle sites yet since I don't want to spend on a VPS or dedi and getting a fake hosting site created.

Can autoblogging be tested on shared hosting? I just want a blog that autoposts enough a day to where it's not going to be a problem with my hosting. I want to only concentrate on small niches, although I don't know how hard it will be to find that many RSS feeds for smaller niches, but I'm willing to give it a try.

I understand cycle sites are for link building, but I would like to start as many autoblogs as I can and monetize with adsense or whatever else and try to get these blogs to rank in SERPs from the new posts being added regularly. Is this possible or would these posts count as duplicate content since they're being scraped from RSS feeds?

Thanks
 


ubaidabcd said:
what's the difference between cycle sites and autoblogging?
Click to expand...

This is on my list of "to figure out" as well.

ubaidabcd said:
With autoblogging, can you limit how many posts are made a day?
Click to expand...

Hmm with wp-o I know you can set it to pull a feed on a schedule like a cron job, so say your feed contains max 10 items and you set it to pull once a day you've accomplished what you're after. Adjust your schedule as needed with larger feeds.

ubaidabcd said:
Can autoblogging be tested on shared hosting?
Click to expand...

Performance-wise, no problem. If you're using WordPress + wp-o-matic, it's really no different than a standard WordPress install. I have pingbacks turned off so my "fetch" operations take <1 second and I only do them every 5 hours...
 
Cycle sites are autoblogs on crack basically. An autoblog is any blog that does the updating itself to some degree. In other words, they pull feeds from other blogs or search engines and posts those to the autoblog (also known as a "splog" or "spam blog").

Where cycles sites differ (primarily) is the number of feeds they pull and ping per day. If you read through the huge thread in the SQUIRT forum, you'll notice that people are using feeds to post 1000 - 4000 posts per day. Also, with the cycle site they automatically try to send a trackback to the blog they took the content from. Sometimes they are successful, sometimes not. But the fact that you are hitting 1000's of blogs / posts per day, they will be successful enough to build a shit load of links in a short period of time. After which you shut it down and park the domain or put up a static page.

Because WP is not very efficient in terms of server resources, it's best not to do a cycle site on shared hosting. You'll get your account terminated very quickly, if you don't crash the server first.

Autoblogs, on the other hand, are generally much more tame - only pulling from a few feeds per day. Most autoblogs can run forever without too much of a problem. I've got one that has been plugging along for a long time with zero problems, but it only pulls from 5 feeds, and only when I bother to manually click "Update". It makes about $0.15 to $0.30 per day (woo hoo). Now figure it takes me less than 30 seconds per week or month to deal with. Hell, I actually forgot about it for a couple months and it still did it's thing. Figure out a way to hammer out 1000 of those and you got a decent daily income.

It's all about scale and what you are trying to accomplish.

/edit/ forgot to add: that small autoblog is ALL duplicate content, yet it is indexed in all the SE's and has links to it.
 
Finally got somthing. I don't know why, but Eli's script didn't work on my server, maybe it is because that I installed PHP5 myself. I tracked the problem and found the http lib he is using (snoopy) didn't work at all, it didn't return anything. I have to hack it to make it works. Anyway there are some random articles on my site now.
 
SEO_Mike said:
Correct. This way the results appear on my site, and doesn't redirect the user to eBay. I'm trying to get data feeds from other ticket sellers, so I can do a comparison. It is my opinion (and you know what opinions are like :D ) that if a visitor can compare the prices of 3 or 4 different sellers on one site, they are more likely to purchase at that time, than if you one have one. With only one site's prices, they are more likely to keep looking for the best price, and after they have comparison shopped long enough, then they'll buy. So, I want to eliminate the user having to go elsewhere to compare prices.

Oh yeah, back to the API, the code for it was taken from eBay's sample code. Saved me a ton of time. I just edited it slightly, tested it in the sandbox, tested it live, found out I needed to enable domxlst in my server, did that, and it's good. Oh yeah, and the call to LiquidWeb's tech support to learn how to enable that part of PHP took a whopping 7 mins 19 secs :D I love LiquidWeb!
Click to expand...

emm, here is something I have worked on
vacation rental / holiday rental search engine
It scrapes rental informations from many sites.
I wrote the engine, he did the web pages himself. Since he paid decent $$ to me, I guess he should expect decent income from that:D
Now I know why there are always some guys looking for "site scraper" scripts. Maybe I should create one for myself, just don't know what to scrape:xomunch:
 
BamBam, your hosting issues resolved?
What was the problem?

::emp::
 
Yup yup, i managed to sap 70% of my shared hosting's MySQL resources! haha, so they shut my badass down.

I've found a better host now, just in the process of tranferring all of my websites, which is a pain in the ass!
 
purpureleaf said:
But I think those RSS feeds don't have the whole article, only the summary, right?
This is really a problem.
Click to expand...

Yup, thats why its for Cyclesites and not Autoblogs.

Cyclesites are there PURELY for trackback links. Autoblogs need the entire article.
 
^^^ I hope so! I thought mostly you were getting traffic from pinging the aggregators (man I may really be talking out my ass here) - anyway I'm confused why you would need the full articles.

I've got a few of my sites live now and am fetching and pinging every 5 hours. Anyone have a guess when I should see traffic? Is there a way I can search and see if my feeds are being picked up?
 
purpureleaf said:
but didn't you do your autoblog using eli's script?
I used the file you uploaded, but it only has summary.
Click to expand...

Yup, but i use an older (I think) version of wp-autoblog. One which has the option to grab Extracts or Full Feeds.

smap said:
^^^ I hope so! I thought mostly you were getting traffic from pinging the aggregators (man I may really be talking out my ass here) - anyway I'm confused why you would need the full articles.

I've got a few of my sites live now and am fetching and pinging every 5 hours. Anyone have a guess when I should see traffic? Is there a way I can search and see if my feeds are being picked up?
Click to expand...

I started seeing good traffic within 24 hours, but mine was detching every time somone visited. So it was like a rolling stone, once it started it just grabbed more and more!

Have faith brother, they will come. Oh yes, they will come.
 
Just thought I'd give an update on my progress - no where near as good as everyone else, got bogged down in lots of offline work so haven't been able to work as many hours.

I used all the information that I've gotten from this thread and others, and just using a couple of basic changes I've made one of my old blogs go from nothing a week to about a dollar. Yes, a whole dollar - everyone laugh at the newb. I still have social media promotion stuff to try and proper link building so I reckon it might turn out to be half decent, then just make another few hundred of them.

I have another 6 sites in the pipeline and have just got my reseller hosting sorted out so hopefully will see some better figures by the end of the month. But I think the main point of this challenge was to get people's arse's moving - and that's certainly what has happened for me.
 
DBWebDev said:
Just thought I'd give an update on my progress - no where near as good as everyone else, got bogged down in lots of offline work so haven't been able to work as many hours.

I used all the information that I've gotten from this thread and others, and just using a couple of basic changes I've made one of my old blogs go from nothing a week to about a dollar. Yes, a whole dollar - everyone laugh at the newb. I still have social media promotion stuff to try and proper link building so I reckon it might turn out to be half decent, then just make another few hundred of them.

I have another 6 sites in the pipeline and have just got my reseller hosting sorted out so hopefully will see some better figures by the end of the month. But I think the main point of this challenge was to get people's arse's moving - and that's certainly what has happened for me.
Click to expand...
A dollar is good man, ya gotta start somewhere!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom