Holly smokes! What a productive week it has been for me on my SEO empire building journey!
This week I continued on with my experiment to use WordPress MU as a template engine. What I wanted to do is simply download a bunch of WordPress plugins to customize my sites for things such as the menus, but I found out that a lot of the already made plugins don’t work with MU natively. After fumbling around with them trying to get them to work, I decided to give up and create my own and 2 hours later I had everything ready to go. Considering I haven’t had too much experience hooking into the WordPress engine, I think 2 hours is very respectable.
My next task was to create a CURL script to login to my WordPress Blog and create all the categories that I would need for my database web site. The data that I download from the web this weekend was absolutely huge and took much of the afternoon to scrape. I reckon that I have over 20,000 individual records that I want to put into my WordPress MU blog. Using the techniques that I spelled out in my other posts, I should be able to come up with close to 500,000 individual web posts when I go live with the site.
My PHP/CURL script created over 600 categories for my various posts, and now I am writing the script to submit all the postings to the blog. What is very cool about doing this is that I will put the script on a cron job and post the site over time, thereby making the search engine spiders go NUTTS! I am really excited to see how this will go over. I will make sure to post the results on this blog.
More exciting news… I finally got into GOOGLE on a few of my database sites… no traffic yet, but by using a new domain name and doing very little to promote the site I am indexed (which is the entire point of Eli’s SEO empire technique).
My 2 cents… this is still a heck of a lot of work! On Saturday, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even see straight. I had to walk away from my computer and get outside and chill out. This road is definitely not for the faint of heart. It is hard to do all of this work and not see the immediate return, and that is why I think a lot of people don’t follow this path.
So what do I say to people who don’t want to do the work…. MORE FOR ME 
Filed under: Activity Log, Progress Reports | Tagged: blog, CURL, database sites, Google, PHP, script, Search engine spiders, Seo Empire, wordpress, Wordpress MU
hi, I enjoy your blog. I have read Eli’s Seo Empire blog posts also. Very inspiring. I have a question regarding MU. Are you using MU to just manage all your db sites. Are you just finding a niche and then finding a large site for that niche and scraping it.
Im a noob to all this. im sure as I folloe your blog ill be buggin you with more questions.
very soon I will take the plunge and do this myself.
could I see an example of one of your db sites if you have one live?
azconza,
The first two database sites that I made used the SMARTY template system. Using SMARTY is quick and easy to use to create a large site BUT… I found myself wrestling with the navigation logic which changed with each site. That is why I am looking at MU instead of using SMARTY, due to the fact that the WordPress Engine takes care of the navigation, linking, and the mod rewrites for me. I believe this will make it quicker for me in the future to create large sites (although it is taking a lot of upfront work).
How I find a niche is based upon 2 criteria….
1. What kind of affiliate programs are there for given niche?
2. Is there a lot of data to scrape for niche?
If both are positive, that is when I jump into the niche and create a large site by scraping data from other web sites, spinning it into new content, and then putting up a lot of pages.
Want to see a site… I will send you a link to the address of my first site via email… not my best work, but it is starting to pull traffic.
hey hows it going.. any idea where i can learn some php to be about to create a database website ?
loving your blog… need to update it more thou hehe any chance i could check out that link aswell ? How have you found the seo empire ?