RSS Feeds, Pending Posts, and how to clear your backlog

Sometimes your backlog of pending can become a nightmare

Last week I talked about one issue with RSS Feeds… duplication. This week, I’m going to show you how to go scorched earth on your unmanageable backlog of pending posts.

If you’ve set up an autoblogger like Feedwordpress, you’ve no doubt made the mistake of not setting them to mark as pending before running your first fetch… Four hours later, after the cleanup on your site, and stripping out all your automatic notifications to twitter or elsewhere, you’ll never ever make that mistake again…

RSS Feeds, Duplicate Content, Redirects…

The joys of autoblogging... Duplicate posts galore!

I was testing out RSS feeds on one of my sites and found that Feedwordpress was quite happy to post a half dozen copies of the same article. WordPress just adds a -2 to the end and carries on.

 

But you don’t really want duplication like that… Search engines don’t like it, readers don’t like it… what’s the point?

First thing I did was grab a copy of “Delete Duplicate Posts” from CleverPlugins.com. (Sadly, their site is currently offline due to the death of one of the business partners)

This plugin isn’t very sophisticated, but if

I was happy to see a comment correcting me on my Tag clouds, link count and SEO post by the author of Howling Wulf and I wanted to point you guys over to his blog. I’m still finding my way, but it looks like he’s been at this for a while (ten years in the industry, and about two years of blogging), so definitely worth a read. I know I plan to spend a fair chunk of this weekend reading through the archives.

Thanks for the comment, Howling Wulf, I appreciate the correction and its nice to know that I’m not just talking to myself here.

Hmm, I may need to rethink what I’m posting now that I know other people are reading this…

Why MySpace blows for SEO

I’ve been looking at different ways to get sites out there, and one common technique is to reg accounts with popular social networking sites and link to your site from them… Hey, Facebook has high PR, right? Too bad they’ll kill my content in a heartbeat…

But hey, I’m friends with a bunch of porn stars on myspace, what about it? Can I turn my myspace page into an SEO linking juggernaut? Neg!

So, it turns out that a while back, MySpace put something in place to keep evil marketing people like me and you from taking advantage of their site… They did this by way of a new domain, msplinks.com… All outbound links from myspace get rewritten to a msplinks.com address (think bit.ly) before getting redirected on to the ultimate target.

This would still be fine for SEO except that they pass this redirect as a 302… So search engines ignore the target and give credit back to the origin, which is msplinks…

They also look at the referrer that gets passed and redirect you to myspace if you aren’t coming from there, so you can’t use it as your leet hax0r bit.ly server that nobody else knows about…

Oh well, fuck myspace. I haven’t seen layout that shitty since my first geocities page.