Niche Grouping blogs

[Dane Morgan]

Lets say I have two passions in life and I want to dominate them with Blog Solution (yes I know, howitzer and flys, but I might have a few dozen passions too, and two is easier for the example). My first passion is crocheting and my second passion is base jumping from trump tower. I'd like to set up links to parachute suppliers and yarn suppliers, but have them only show up where appropriate.

If we could have user defined niche categories we could assign blog links, post links and blogs to these categories and keep our ads neatly seperated.
And it could be done with just two extra tables in the db I think.

[Canuck]

That is exactly what I was thinking. To be able to categorize the themes would be awesome. I love BS however having only one feed to all is not as good as being able to using different feeds for different categories, this becomes extra powerful when using CS with BS.

[fisinc]

I just posted the same thing over in thread about wildcard domains versus /users.

This would be a great feature but the true question is does it matter?  Sure it looks untidy to have car parts links in a article about gardening, but do you think people will acutally see these blogs?  They are more for backlinks...right?

[David]

I have two ways I'm building these for niche AdSense purposes:

1. Subdirectories, related keywords.  I'll build a site on say "bicycles" and use all bicycle-related keywords, building blogs in subdomains. Ultimatly I'll end up with a super bicycle site.

2. Subdomains, unrelated keywords. Here I'll just use maybe 100 unrelated, strong keywords. Since they are in subdomains, the SE's will view them as separate sites, and not penalize me for them being unrelated.

We'll see which one plays better. They each have their advantages.

Option 1 creates a nice, large, expert site on one topic, and should rank pretty well. I'll have to make sure not to build it too fast, set it up for slow growth. However, the keywords are going to be weaker, because I'm not picking the best bicycle keywords, I'm picking the most popular.

Option 2 has the advantage of using great keywords. These are chosen for their low competition and high pay. A note of caution here. You must change the setting in your settings area under "fetch url's forming options" to "first keyword / all feed templates" or you will get unrelated posts!

Let the testing begin.......

What's everybody else doing?

(I'm also building blogs to develop links to other sites, but that's a different topic.)

[Davo]

You must change the setting in your settings area under "fetch url's forming options" to "first keyword / all feed templates" or you will get unrelated posts!

Where can I read up on these options, so I understand exactly how each of the possible choices will work?

Choices for Fetch URLs forming options:
all keywords / all feed templates
all keywords / first feed template
first keyword / first feed template
first keyword / all feed templates

[David]

Hey Davo -  Good to run into you on (yet again) another forum!

I couldn't find much on this, but here are my thoughts on how it works.

Note that you have links to some of your other blogs on each page. On the stock templates they are called "friendly blogs." Basically just interlinking your blogs, right?

What I noticed was that the feeds that it was getting for one blog were off-topic, because it was using feeds that were the topics for the links on that page. That's what happens when you use these two choices, it searches for rss feeds with the other keywords:

all keywords / all feed templates
all keywords / first feed template

You need to change it to:
first keyword / all feed templates

to get all of the feeds on-topic for that blog, because it only uses the first keyword (which is the topic for that blog) in its search.

I don't understand it very well, but that's how it works. Maybe Omar can add something?

[Dane Morgan]

I just posted the same thing over in thread about wildcard domains versus /users.

This would be a great feature but the true question is does it matter?  Sure it looks untidy to have car parts links in a article about gardening, but do you think people will acutally see these blogs?  They are more for backlinks...right?

I know for a fact that people will see these blogs. Just look at your logs.

Even if not one of them were ever seen by human visitors (ie. you are cloaking) links from on topic pages are better than links from off topic pages.

[Dane Morgan]

BTW. One interim solution is to make Content Solution sets of links for each niche and then add the feed to related BS blogs just like any other feed.

[Vic]

Even with the "first keyword / all feed templates" settings, for me the problem comes in when I want to add a bulk list of links to be added to individual posts.

Even if a subdomain blog is on target and has only related BS links in the sidebar, doesn't it grab external links randomly to add to posts? Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but if you have 100 unrelated subdomain blogs and you add 1,000 links covering 100 unrelated topics, wouldn't BS just splash all those links across all blogs?

Vic

[Dane Morgan]

Sorry, vic, I wasn't very thourough in my post. In order to add the links using CS and posting them to the blogs, you would need to add each niche specific CS feed to the correctly related blogs individually either through the edit blogs links or through direct database insertions. The first option is easier and safer and the second a lot faster.

[Vic]

Sorry, vic, I wasn't very thourough in my post. In order to add the links using CS and posting them to the blogs, you would need to add each niche specific CS feed to the correctly related blogs individually either through the edit blogs links or through direct database insertions. The first option is easier and safer and the second a lot faster.

Ah... I thought the only way to add CS feeds was site-wide via the Settings menu in BS.

Vic