Sunday Chatter – 3/9

March 9th, 2008 posted by Chris Jacobson · No Comments

WordPress Auction Plugin

A cool new plugin I came across this week is the WordPress Auction Plugin. Basically it allows you to setup your own auction on your blog without having to pay eBay any sort of commissions by listing it with them. John Cow put up an old Apple iPod this week that he’s had laying around for a while. Using this plugin is not only a great way to make some extra money, but you can also gain additional traffic to your blog as well. Another great thing is that you can get the plugin customized to match your own blog design. We all know how much people hate the standard “blue scheme” of almost every widget out there. I’d put this up myself if I had anything to auction off… anyone want a MoneyMakingScoop.com shirt? Probably not. 😛

Know Your Robots.txt

Getting to know your robots.txt file is very important if you run a website. You should already have one, but if you don’t, open up Notepad and start creating one, then upload it to the index folder of your domain. ShoeMoney touched on an issue this week in regards to customizing your robots file to prevent duplicate content being picked up by the search engines.

Specifically this is some of the things I use in my robots.txt
Disallow: /*? – this blocks all urls with a ? in them. A good way to avoid duplicate content issues with wordpress blogs. Obviously you only want to use this if you have changed your url structure to not be 100% ?=.
Disallow: /*.php$ – This blocks all .php files. Another good way to avoid duplicate content with a wordpress blog.
Disallow: /*.inc$ – you should not be showing .inc or include files to bots (google code search will eat you alive)

Read more about robots.txt.

Need Help Getting Blog Traffic?

If you’re struggling to get enough visitors to your blog to make writing worth your while, there’s now something you can do about it. BloggingTips.com has written 5 FREE ways to generate great web visitors to your blog. In part one, Rob Mead explains how writing in a certain style can have an impact on whether or not visitors return or forget about you forever.