Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web

Back in November, Jeremy Zawodny posted about RSS2Blog labelling it a splog tool and there was a whole choir of those condemning everybody using RSS 2 Blog as spammers, sploggers and what not - while I and at least one more person noted in the comments that it’s not the tool that spams as a tool can be used for different purposes. Well, this might be a bit surprizing for this black hat blog but I thought I’d still list all those reasons I can come up with for legitimate (e.g. not spammy, or sploggy, to that matter) use of RSStoBlog.

1. You go on a holiday and want your (pre-written) stuff posted to your blog daily - you put it inot RSS2Blog and set the time when to post.

2. You want to track the search results for a particular term/keyword/maybe even group of keywords - set up these search results to be posted with your RSS to Blog and you’re done.

3. You want news on a specific topic posted to your blog regularly along with something you normally write manually  - RSS to Blog is an easy way of automating that task.

4. You want to keep track (and maybe let other people keep track) of stuff posted on multiple blogs, 301powered.com-style (some may call it spam or scraping or whatever they like - I’d simply call it aggregation, not much different from what Google News does) - this can be achieved using the feeds from those blogs and, again, RSS2Blog.

5.  You want to post (even if manually) to several blogs using one and the same interface not to overcomplicarte things - RSS to Blog is of use in this case as well.

6. You want to use a user-defined list of services to ping every time you post to your blog (not so easy if your blog is not WordPress-powered) - RSS to blog is the solution to this.

7. Finally, what if you simply hate your blogging tool’s interface? OK RSS2Blog’s interface might not be the coolest one out there but it’s still a solution, no worse than Blogger’s official plugin for MS Word…

So as we can see, the legitimate uses are a no-brainer - now, to come up with really smart black hat solutions where RSS2Blog can be employed really neat takes some imagination - and it’s up to you to figure that out - just like with any other tool…

So as some of you might have noticed, comments on this blog have been broken for a while now. I think Earl messed them up when messing with something on the server. Anyway, no matter what we tried to fix them didn’t work so far. If anmy of you knows how to fix broken WP comments please email me to irishwonder at irishwonder dot com. Thanks.

My favourite Statcounter just came up with an update that saves me a few dozen clicks a day. You see, I have a ton of sites in my Statcounter projects list, and checking how many visitors ech one of them had each day used to be a real pain. Well, not anymore, as they now display the number of pageloads today and yesterday on the projects page right next to the total number of pageloads. That sure still doesn’t tell you much about the unique visitors - but at least you get the general idea at a glance. Thanks, Aodhán!