Today I have the pleasure to share with you a free wordpress plugin to automatically populate your blog with content from Yahoo! Answers.

For those of you that might not be familiar with Yahoo! Answers, it’s been described as

“The largest knowledge-sharing community on the Web. It’s an online community where anyone can ask and answer questions on any topic. Yahoo! Answers connects people to the information they’re seeking with those who know it. Everyone has life experience and knowledge about something, and Yahoo! Answers provides a way for people to share their experience and insight.”

So ya its a cool site, buts its also a great source of content, and this plugin will allow you to use all that content on your own website with ease.

WP-YA Grabber will create a post from questions asked on Yahoo! Answers and then insert all the answers to that question as comments on that post.

I often use this plugin on affiliate product sites I create with EZ Empire Builder.  I’ve found that this plugin tends to add that “human element” to these affiliate sites that users can connect with, and it increases the visitors duration and trust factor a bit.  People somehow feel more inclined to stay on a site and trust its links a bit more if they can see that others have found that site useful as well.  I think the proper term for it is “social proof”.

So what I do is create a few FAQ/Support/Forum type categories on my EZ Empire Builder built websites, and load them up with questions and answers using this plugin.  I then activate  the recent comments sidebar widget and set it to show the last 5-10 “comments” left … aka the answers from yahoo answers.  Visitors to the site then see all kinds of “activity” on the site, and consider it to be a trustworthy source.  At least it seems to work that way, so i consider it a nice little companion for these kinds of sites.

WP-YA Grabber works for all languages supported by Yahoo! Answers.  Allows you to define the exact topic categories, and sub categories you would like your content pulled from.  And allows you to enter in specific keywords to further refine the content.

So if you only want to post content in “German” from the “pets” category, and the “fish” subcategory which is about “discus” you can set all that up in about 45 seconds per category =)

If your unsure if this kind of content would be a good fit for your blog, I would suggest just downloading it and giving it a try.  Create a test category in your blog, and post everything into that test category, if you don’t like it just delete everything and try again.  This plugin is pretty simple to use.

You can install this plugin on as many blogs as you would like for free & each domain will be given a unique unlock code when its activated.

I’ve personally used this Yahoo Answers plugin on wp2.5-wp3.0.1, on godaddy, hostgator, vps.net, and seohosting servers without any troubles (knock on wood).   If you have any troubles with it let us know and we will do what we can to help get you going.

If you enjoy this plugin let us know.  We’ve been meaning to release a series of little free wordpress plug-ins like this for months now but keep getting side tracked.  So if you like free wordpress plugins like this leave a comment below and I will keep passing them along your way.

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I’ve often considered Google to be much like a credit bureau.

They look at every imaginable condition and apply a positive + or negative – mark for each, and end up with a final “credit” score that they apply to your sites.

This is your Google Credit Score and it comes about through a very systematic approach.

By setting your site on their “desk”, you’re essentially asking for a loan and the Google Loan Officer is going to run a quick background check to determine whether you qualify.

So, here goes. Here are some possible things the Google Creditor may watch for:

1. New domains – Age is important. New, fresh domain names receive only limited love.

2. Questionable TLD’s – Certain TLDs attract spam. .info domains, for example, are inexpensive. Cheap, in fact. And, the money-conscious blackhat marketer has purchased hundreds of thousands of these domains at 99¢ for the purpose of spamming the search engines. There is speculation that Google *might* give a minus mark for certain TLD’s, such as this, but the verdict is still out.

Personally, I don’t buy it. But, that’s for you to decide.

3. Too much, Too fast – So, sir, you have written 500 new articles on ‘Viagra in the last 24 hours, eh? Very impressive. Let me give you a Gold Star!”

NOT!

It often amazes me to think about. I’ve made similar poor judgment calls myself many times in the past. But, Google is in the business of indexing quality content. If you want on their good side, do NOT post a 500 page deep site in 5 seconds and expect to not wear a big red, written-in-lipstick sign on your forehead that says, “SPAMMER!”

Anyway, I’m going to have to end it here as I have a lot of work to do. There is a new video coming out later today that will cover all the udpate changes to WordPress Cloaker.

Oh yeah, there is an update for WordPress Cloaker coming out within the next 24-hours with lots of new features…

P. S. I’ve really wanted to write an article on the Google as a Creditor for awhile now, so I’ll plan on adding to this article over time… I know I’m leaving it hanging there a bit for now.

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See it Here!

If you’re not already doing it, I suggest you seriously consider using cron to populate your blogs rather than relying on the WordPress’ built-in scheduler.

One of the biggest reasons automated site builds fail is due to the user building too many pages, too fast. It does not appear natural and is an easy way to set-off alarms to the Search Engines who are constantly looking for any reason in the world to de-list your website from their Index.

Using cron allows you to post just 1 or 2 or any controlled number of fresh posts each and every day, over time and into infinity rather than posting 100 or 500 posts all at once. WP Feeder and WP Scraper and WP Tube allow you to do this also, by using WordPress’ built-in scheduler but, that’s not a perfect approach.

For one, when you do this, those stories tend to ping services at the time the story is saved, not at the time the story is published. This is bad because RSS directories do NOT want to get pounded with 500 pings at once. They will simply flag your domain and stop monitoring it.

This sucks for you because now your pages won’t get spider love the way you want for quick indexing. Instead, RSS directories ignore your future requests. In effect, you’ve been banned from their services on day one.

Now, do they literally ban you? I’m not sure. I haven’t had the time to verify this but it’s a logical assumption and I know for a fact that they will at least put you on a temporary IP ban list. I’m just not sure if the ban lasts for 5 minutes, 24 hours, 30-days or forever.

Next, you have the freshness of your posts to consider.

Lets say you’re building a site on Tattoo designs. You grab 200 posts and schedule them to post evenly over a 365 day schedule. That is, your 200th post will happen sometime around this time, next year.

That’s pretty awesome, really. The few minutes of work you do today will still be working hard for you while you enjoy your next birthday party and beyond. Amazing tho think about, yeah?

Well, this is all great, but the problem is, these stories are from last year.

But, imagine Kat Von D from the popular LA Ink show gets drunk, runs over a pack of nuns, loses her job, opens a convent to make up for her sins, and ends up tattooing all the nuns in the convent in their sleep and it turns into some reality TV show and bears life to a whole new tattoo industry, guess what?

Your site won’t cover any of this and your traffic will show it.

Or, you can simply use Cron to pull 1-2 new, hot-off-the-press stories each and every day. 365 days from now, your site will still pull the latest industry related stories and you’ll never have to worry about your site being stale and outdated, ever again.

Morale of the story: Use cron or experience that “unfresh feeling” into eternity.

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