WordPress Cloaker – Blog

New Video Release (Cron)

I’ve released a new video in the Customer Video Section explaining how to setup Cron Jobs on your server.

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.

Tags: Content Dripping, Cron, ping services, rss

Setup Cron on Godaddy

1. Godaddy Hosting Homepage

2. At Cron Manager Page: Click “Create Cron Job” button

3. Fill out the form: Godaddy provides a Browse button to select the file (pretty easier). The cron command will be constructed automatically.

4. Browse Window: Just browse to your WP installation directory and select the index.php file.

5. After file selection, fill in other fields.

6. Done.

Note: Don’t forget to edit email address for cron report.

Tags: Cloaking, Cron, Godaddy, How to's, Tutorials, WordPress Cloaker

Setup Cron on HostGator

IMPORTANT: These notes ONLY apply to people using HostGator or SEOhosting hosting accounts.

HostGator and .htaccess…

When it comes to running simple cron commands on your HostGator hosting account, you’ll need to place a .htaccess file in the cgi-bin of each account.

This .htaccess file must be placed in the public_html directory of each website hosted on a shared hosting package.

If you have a reseller account, you only need to put it in the main cgi-bin. This will then eliminate your need to duplicate the file for each individual public_html directory.

Editing your .htaccess File…

Here are the commands to place inside your .htaccess file if you are using HostGator:

<Limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
</Limit>
<Limit PUT DELETE>
order deny,allow
deny from all
</Limit>

Step-by-Step Screen Shots: Setting up Cron

Here are some screenshots to assist in setting up cron on HOSGATOR HOSTING accounts.

NOTE: You may click on the below images to view larger screen shots.

1. From CPANEL Homepage:

2. Cron Jobs page:

3. Set 1. Email address, 2. Put command cron command we provide, and 3. Set the schedule.

4. Done

The Cron Code

The following commands seem to work with HostGator and my plugins…

php /home/yourfolder/public_html/yoursite.com/index.php
action=cl_cron cron_code=0123456

php -q /home/yourfolder/public_html/yoursite.com/index.php
action=cl_cron cron_code=0123456

…where “yourfolder” = your sites folder and where “0123456″ is your cron code found in the ‘Options’ tab of the relevant plugin (ie., WP Scraper or WP Feeder, etc)…

Additional questions? Email support for more help.

Tags: Cron, HostGator, Hosting, How to's, Tutorials, WordPress Cloaker, WordPress Feeder, WordPress Scraper