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Tuning My Pipes, Using Yahoo Pipes to Start Stories and Drive Traffic

I am working on an experiment that uses Yahoo Pipes to start many of my blog posts for me.  This was partly to keep my blog moving while I go on vacation, but it is also turning into a way for me to Optimize my content for Search Engines.

SEO relies on a lot of factors, but one of the most important is how fast you were to respond to a topic.  By having Pipes start my posts I can get to market faster and then follow up with stories that are particularly interesting to me.

If I get my pipes tuned correctly I will also be serving my RSS subscribers by highlighting articles that would interest them on other sites as well.  We will have to wait and see how well this works. I was hoping for about 6 posts to be automated a day and it looks like I’m getting more than that at the moment so I may have to tweak things a bit more, but I’d be interested in feed back if this is a good thing or if I’m just filling up your RSS reader.

Based on feed back from Feed burner it looks like I’m doing ok, as most of the clicks are on topics that auto-populated, making me wonder if I’d not do better just letting the computer write for me :-).

I was blown away at the power of Yahoo Pipes, but also the limitations.  There aren’t wild cards in the string replacements and other things that I thought should be there.  Also if you are tweaking a pipe often you have to close it and reopen as the interface starts to get slow and buggy.

I will do a demo of using PHP with Yahoo Pipes to create Stacked Pipes when I get back from my trip home.  You can do some neat things by converting information from a page or database to RSS feeding that to Yahoo, and then doing some parsing in PHP and feeding that back to yahoo again.

-- Brandon Wirtz

Tags: PHP;, Yahoo;
Filed in: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Technical