The Semi-Automated Site Factory: Consolidating SEO Efforts

Ok. So SEO has progressed into a big money industry. One thing I’ve seen during my relatively short(comparatively) existance in the industry is a seen a transition from manual work, to outsourcing, to now smaller corporations springing up that are essentially an outsourcing frontend. Companies that may(for example) have a massive site network that you order outsourced posts from, companies that have built in article creation queues, companies that offer blog commenting and directory submission. All of this has greatly improved the efficiency with which one can operate. All of these are steps towards automation in an odd way. A “set it and forget it” that still involves humans. Today we’re going to cover how to take that, and turn it into something even more automated by consolidating these services into our own backend to create mini-sites.




Introduction

This entry is going to be in context of “mini sites” (as people have expressed a fair amount of interest in those), and creating a mini-site factory. For the SEO that may not be able to create additional sites(due to contracts and whatnot), simply remove the tactics you cannot use and you’ve still got a great linkbuilding and content generation setup.



It’s been noted many times that often the most effective SEO is that which rides the line of blackhat(read: automation) but still stays within the white/grayhat realm(read:semi-automation).



What is Our Goal for Our Mini Sites

Our goal is to have them each be in a subniche of the same niche, and use them to help promote our primary domain. They have enough content to be a defensible site, and enough links to provide some juice linking back to our primary domain. So we need to get 3 things handled. The template for the new sites, content for the new sites, and the linkbuilding for the new sites. Keep in mind these are not explicitely designed to rank themselves.



The Site Factory



The Template - This gets much easier if you’re using a consistant CMS like wordpress. Either way, it’s the major disconnect in the entire process, and something best handled by either yourself, or someone in a position of trust. It’s essentially downloading templates that would look acceptable for your niche, removing those damnable footer links, and loading them into a template folder. Do a lot in the first place. As this is the most hands-on part of the process(excluding domain purchases), it’s something we want to get out of the way early.

The Content Building - Keywords here is “backend” and “outsourcing”.

Get yourself a reliably good writer. All of this becomes about 20x more difficult if you have to review posts before they go live, and essentially removes the entire point of this entire entry.

Create yourself a lovely backend. Your entire input: domain, list of topics. This displays to your article writer. They have a place to paste each article and select the proper site. When all articles for the site are completed, it’s not too hard to set something up to automatically paypal them and record the transaction

The actual post of the information is easiest with Wordpress. You can just tie in your writer’s backend to the blogs with XMLRPC, and easily post straight from their console(even though they don’t need to know your password

If you’re not using the blog format, it’s pretty easy to rig up a fake one. Have the entry insert into a database, then just have the articles section pull from that database based on an ID in the URL (like ?articleid=4 would be SELECT article FROM articles WHERE articleid=4 LIMIT 1)

The Link Building - Ok. You need 2 things for this to work. Reliable junk link methods(directories, commeting, etc), and reliable workers. Depending on your trust level for the workers this can change drastically.

Add the site to the link building queue as soon as they paypal to pay the article writer goes out. It’s moved another step down the assembly line.

Automatic Scripts -No, not link spam. Automatic directory submission is a fun one here. Anything you can do to build fast links automatically is golden so long as you aren’t going to have to monitor for bans because of the method.

Directing the Outsourced - So you’ve got your outsourced link building guys. How to give them the jobs?

Just Viewing the Job Queue - All they see is the site in question. You rely on them to go out and actually build the links. The upside of this is that it’s really easy. They just check into the queue every day or so, do the work, then go about their business. The downside is just that you have no way to verify their work.

View the Specific URLs - They see the URLs of the directories and blogs you want comments dropped at. The downside is if you don’t especially trust your workers they can run off and sell the list to other places. Also, it’s hard for outsourced workers to do this quickly.

The Complete Backend - If you have someone doing something like blog comments, and you’re paranoid about them running off with your do-follow list or directory list, you can relatively easily create a backend that displays the post and the comment box, or just the forms to submit your site. The downside of this is it doesn’t handle different CMS’s or different anti-spam mods.

The Big Picture

You are now doing very little for site production. Mini sites are getting pumped out for the cost of the domain ($6.00 let’s say), $10-25 for articles, and $10-20 for some basic promotion. So on the cheap end these sites could potentially be manufactured for about $26.00. Maybe $40 for a more significant site. It’s a permanent backlink, and can draw in/direct traffic itself within it’s niche.

Your job? Pick domain, pick keywords, pick article subjects. Not a bad gig, huh?



If you want the per-site cost to go down, you can pretty easily create fewer sites, but add more content to each (this lowers the overall needed promotion to give it some link juice).



No site is going to be able to be 100% supported by these in the form I described, but throwing in some decent cross linking and a few more original tricks, and they can give you some decent traffic and even better link juice.



Important: The function of this system relies HEAVILY on how reliable the people doing the work are. You need people that you know are going to check the queue, and that you know will do the work without you having to police them.



-XMCP



PS: I think I’m going to start posting more, and just rotating what I post about. If there’s an SEO related post one day, the next post will likely be PPC/industry news/a rant. I may eventually decided on 3 or so categories that get rotated in, but for now I’m just going to have fun with it.