WP Robot Plugin for WordPress
A while back I wrote about using WP Robot for automatic content creation. I was playing around with simple sites that create their own content, mostly using WP Robot and eBay affiliate feeds. WP Robot is a WordPress plugin that is able to grab content from a variety of sources and post it to your blog.
I recently found a new use for WP Robot, so I wanted to mention that, in addition to giving an update on two years of WP Robot posts on a couple of sites.
Automated Content Creation
As I’d written about in the original post, I was trying WP Robot out on Outdoor Game Reviews & Outdoor Game Bargains. Over the last couple of years, I’ve more or less left these two sites alone. I’ll occasionally add games to the Review site, but the Bargains site is an eBay affiliate site, which indexes a few different Outdoor Games.
It didn’t take long to realize that Google was pretty adept at ignoring the posts created by WP Robot. Whether for issues with duplicate content or some other reason, very few of these blog pages are indexed. Both sites have continued to create posts, but neither one has seen increases in traffic due to the auto-created content. In fact, I’d almost guess they’ve been indexed less because of it. The Bargains site is virtually dead, and the OGR site only sees traffic to the pages I’ve created with reviews, but almost nothing goes to the blog portion.
Beyond the lack of additional traffic generated by the WP Robot posts, a lot of the posts that have been created have veered pretty far off topic. You can set keywords, but it’s a unique challenge to try to pick keywords that don’t overlap in to other areas. OGR has created posts at a pretty steady rate, but I think you eventually run out of good content for WP Robot to pull, so it pulls whatever else it can find… which isn’t much.
The end result of almost 2 years of WP Robot content? Pretty little benefit. In fact, I think I’ll be removing the posts from OGR to see if I can improve it’s standing in Google by removing the content that they aren’t indexing anyway. I’ll dig in to OGB, but I may remove things there, too.
New Uses for WP Robot
Given my lack of benefit from WP Robot in the past, you might think I’d be sour on it. Not at all, actually. I’ve recently found a use for WP Robot that I’m very happy with. It’s not the hands-off content creator I’d originally hoped for, but it is serving a purpose.
I’ve got a few sites where video content is a great benefit to the site. I’ve recently started posting video content to 3 sites with the help of WP Robot. Cornhole Game Builders, Outdoor Game Players, and Play Drinking Games now have video content.
I’ve found that WP Robot doesn’t do a great job of formatting content, or always picking the correct content, but it does do a heck of a job finding content. WP Robot is able to create posts in Draft mode, which lets you review or revise them before they are posted.
In the case of the video feeds like I’m doing, I let WP Robot create a new YouTube Draft post about once a week. Whenever I have time, I go to the site and browse through the Drafts. I toss the videos that suck right away. The videos I like, I’ll watch and write a few paragraphs of my own text. This allows me to format the post I I’d like, and create some unique content to supplement the video. It’s really easy to quickly describe a video, and the text gives Google something to reference with crawling the page. I can quickly turn 4 or 5 drafts in to posts, then schedule them to publish over the next few weeks. An hour of video watching provides me over a month of blog posts!
Another thing to mention is that I’m now using WP Robot on sites that were already working. All 3 of these sites already had well indexed content, but I was using WordPress Pages, not Posts. I had the blog portion of my website sitting unused. WP Robot gives me an easy, semi-automated option for utilizing something that’s already built in to my site, but not being used. While this content may not create a ton of additional traffic, there’s something it’s doing that can’t be directly measured. It’s actually providing a better user experience!
For all three sites, I’m able to supplement the existing content with video examples. People can see visual examples for the Drinking Games I’ve already written rules for, they can watch people play games I’ve featured on Outdoor Game Players, or people can see people actually building the boards they’re learning how to build on Cornhole Game Builders. All 3 sites are better for the visitor because of the videos. In the end, that may cause them to share the site with somebody else or create that coveted backlink on their blog or website.
So is WP Robot worth it? All depends on how you plan to use it. Customizing the content for your own needs is key. Just setting it up and assuming it’ll create quality content for your website probably won’t work. Use it to supplement your content, or gather content for you, and you might just be as happy as I am with it right now.
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