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WP Snowball: Settings

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Max Levels




This setting determines how big each of your Snowballs is going to be.
A level 0 post is the seed post, each number corresponds to how far away that post is from the seed post (through links). So by setting it at 5, it will not create any posts beyond 5 posts away from the seed post (that will be the 'Max Level'). A new level is created when a human lands on the page - then more posts will be created (unless it's at the max level or has already been triggered). If it reaches the max level - that post will not trigger any more growth.

If you're posting a lot - it's recomended that you set this low (around 3-5), this is because if it's set too high for your posting frequency - you'll soon be posting 000's a day - which is bad for SEO, and can cause a higher load on your server.

If you only ever want to make 1 post - you can set this to 99 and it will continue growing for (almost) forever.

Have a play around with this setting - but to start with set it low (3-5) so you can see how it works.



Max New Posts




This sets the maximum number of posts created when WPSB is triggered to make a new set of posts. Each of these child posts will show as a style in the parent post.

This is a maximum, so there will be a random amount of posts between 1 and the number set here.

Max Links Per Post




Here you can set the maximum links per post - when making a post, WPSB chooses a random number between 0 and your maximum. Then it schedules these links for different times in the future. When the links are aquired, it will show up on the dashboard.

You can force the next link to go live by going to that post and clicking 'Force Next Link' in the debugging box.

Max Emails Per Hour




Most of the links WPSB make uses Post-By-Email, this is because it's simple for you to set up, and there's a lot less that can go wrong with it. The major issue you'll need to think of is your hosts limits. If you've got a VPS/dedicated server then you don't need to worry so much. Most of the time though - if you're on a shared host and you go over their limit - they will stop and further emails you send without notifying you (they may send you an email). With that in mind - read up and set these appropriately. I've noted some of the popular hosts here with their email limits (and a link to the info page)

These figures are for your whole account - so you'll need to divide this number by how many blogs you're running with WP Snowball on.

HostGator
500 / hour
http://www.hostgator.com/mailpolicy.html

DreamHost
100 / hour
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/SMTP_quota

BlueHost
150 / hour
https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/119

ASmallOrange
500 / hour
http://asmallorange.com/terms/

GoDaddy
1000 / DAY (avg ~40 / hour)
http://support.godaddy.com/groups/we...sending-limit/

1&1
3600 / hour
http://faq.1and1.co.uk/communication...eneral/12.html

Max Emails per Day




This is a hard cap on the number of emails WPSB will send per day. Remember your server limits are account-wide, so take that into account. If you've got 10 blogs running WPSB and you're on Godaddy, you should set the max links to less than 4/hour and 100/day.

Link Back To Seed




Checking this will make all posts at max level link back to the seed post. It uses the same style that's selected for other posts. Linking back to the seed post can be beneficial as it increases all pages relevancy and crawl-ability. Effectively making a link-wheel out of each snowball, this passes the pagerank around your site and establishes a solid SEO benefit.

Post As Draft




When this is checked, rather than publishing the posts WPSB makes automatically, it puts them as a draft post for you to manually publish. This can be a good setting if you want to test out content sources before letting them loose on your blog. An important thing to note is that the posting will be in short bursts, as you'll probably have to publish several posts at once. If you do not publish the posts, the Snowball will not grow and you'll get no new posts on the blog.

Source Link




This creates a link at the bottom of the bottom of the post to credit the source of the article. If a resource box is found, then that is used to credit.

This link credits the source of the content, it is recommended to have this on as without crediting posts you may be breaking copyright. Doing so will let Google (and other SE's) that you are not the writer of the content. Your rankings/indexing/visitors may be affected as a result of checking this box.

Uniqueness Filter




Checking this box will cause content to go through several filters to make the content more unique. This changes things like list positioning, capitalization etc. This can cause a 1-10% change in uniqueness depending on the length and type of content.

You can see the overall uniqueness of the article in the debugging box on the post. You should use this if you want an extra boost of uniqueness in the content WPSB produces.

In-Post Debugging




This will add a de-bugging box on every post that is only visible by blog admins. Search engines and visitors won't see this. The debugging box contains information on the content, ads, links, media and has cron links so you can force re-queues and links.

More info on in-post debugging

Info Stuffing




Checking this box will add info stuffing to the post keywords. The info it gets both makes the post more unique and more helpful for visitors.

It gets the definitions from various sources like Wikepedia. These are displayed via CSS so when a visitor hovers over the keyword, a transparent box will appear showing the definition.

The keywords chosen are the ones that mached that content as relevant - so it could be 1,2 or 3. This helps with Google as it both provides unique content and helps visitors.

Auto Tagging




This feature automatically adds tags to each post. It does this by identifying important words in the post and using those as tags.

This can be a good feature to make sure you get keywords that will be relevant to the post, which helps with indexing and ranking.

Keep Article Links




If this is checked - WPSB will keep all links in the article, if you uncheck this - all links will be stripped from the article. If the content has links in the article - these could be affiliate, or it could be to a related resource etc. This is different from Source links as WPSB will take out any links that are there, where Source links adds a link to the source at the end.

Auto Format Keywords




This option formats keywords, adding bold or italic tags to them. This chooses some random keywords to auto-format and edits the HTML adding the tags. This adds (a bit of) uniqueness and improves semantic information for Google, which helps relevancy for your keywords.

Block Bot Clicks




Clicking this will block bots from following trackable links(ads). It does this by looking at the user agent - if it contains common words like bot, spider etc - then they'll be redirected to a '403'(forbidden) page. You may want to check this as some affiliate programs don't want you to be sending lots of bots to them.

Use JS Redirects




Normally, WPSB uses a 302 HTTP location header to redirect to the ad links. If you check this ad clicks will be sent to a page with both a JS redirect and a meta-refresh. This means that only human visitors will get redirected and tracked. This will stop all bots from following the link. This is different to "Block Bot Clicks" as this will stop all bots, not just the ones that say they're bots (scrapers etc).

Clicking this will allow you to track your clicks more effectively as you know they're all human.

Style




This is where you pick what style you want posts linked together with. They will display a title and an excerpt of the post it's linking to.The styles show up in the post content - you can see what each style looks like and edit them in the styles tab.

Words Per Style




Here you can choose how many words you want displayed in each style. This affects content uniqueness, but you don't want to put the whole article in the style or it'll look bad for the visitors. Play around with this setting to see which looks best for you - but I've found 100 provides the best results (this will change depending on niche/content). The idea of this is to provide enough info that the visitor wants to click through to the post, but showing too much can cause visitor drop-offs if they've got to scroll through too much before continuing with the article they're reading.

Category Placement




This setting defines which category posts that WPSB makes are put in.

Parent


If selecting 'Parent' all posts will be in the same category as the seed post of that Snowball. You should use this if you're posting in different categories and you want all posts in the same category as the seed post.

Single


This puts all posts WPSB makes in a defined category (you can use the drop-down menu to select one of your categories). You can use this if you want the post that you make to be in one category, and all the child posts from that Snowball to be placed in a different category.

KW Selection




Here you can select where WPSB gets it's keyword(s) from. WPSB uses this keyword to collect content, select ads and uses for formatting.

Auto

If you select auto, WPSB will get the keyword from the post that's triggering it's creation. If you use this, sometimes WPSB may find it hard to get content for the keyword, but the general topic of the Snowball may change throughout. For example if you post about Iphone games, it may end up that you've got posts on Iphone cases or PC games.

Category Name

You should use this if you want all posts to be concentrated on one topic. To have this enabled - you should think carefully about your category names, as if you make it too specific you may find that WPSB runs out of content it can find on the topic. Generally, you'll find this setting produces more relevant content - as long as your category names are semi-generic.(not something like "marie piper potato farming in texas", more like "potato farming")

Core KWs




This is one of the most important settings in WPSB, and if you enter bad keywords here, you'll end up with poor content relevancy.

Effectively, this is a keyword filter. When content gets collected (from a keyword search) it gets checked against your core keywords, to ensure that content doesn't go off-topic.

In the box you should enter 3 one word keywords, these should be completely non ambiguous. You should think which words only appear in your niche, if you enter 'iphone' it will accept any article that has iphone in it, if you enter 'money' it will accept any article that mentions money (that's a lot - this is a bad core kw). If an article contains two of these core keywords, it will be made into a post.

You can use a '*'(asterisk) as a wildcard, meaning that it will match anything. an example of this is "prox*" would match both proxy and proxies. Be careful with this as you could have unwanted matches, for example "comp*" would match computer and compensation (and lots more). Wildcards are best used for matching both singular/plurals.

If you're getting irrelevant content - you should change these core keywords to something more non-ambiguous.

These keywords should be broad enough to represent the general, top level idea of your niche, but specific enough to eliminate irrelevant content. These keywords must be regularly used in your niche - together. If 2 aren’t found in the content, it's blocked.

Different niches will have very different core keywords, for example a general themed blog will have slightly broad core keywords, but a more niche blog will have slightly more specific ones.

Keywords To Links



If you want to link specific keywords to url's, you can do that here. WPSB will link keywords entered here to a specific url. You can enter as many as you want. This might be useful for different affiliate links etc.

You can use the wildcard '*' to match anything after what you've entered. a commer separates the keywords and a '#'(hash) signifies that the url you want to link to is displayed after.

If you enter:
Google,Apple,tyr* # http://google.com
WPSB will link the words "Google","Apple","tyre","tyres","tyrants" to "http://google.com".

If you enter:
book,ebook # http://bookstore.com
painting,drawing # http://art.com
WPSB will link the words 'book' and 'ebook' to 'http://bookstore.com' AND:
'painting' and 'drawing' will link to 'http://art.com'

The links will only be created if the word is in the post, and will create a max number of keyword links per post. You can select how many of these links you want in each post with the option below.

Max KWs To Links





Here you can select the maximum number of links that WPSB will create with the 'keywords to links' entered. This is a maximum number and a link will only be added if there's the keyword in the post, so you may find that you have 0 links in one post and your maximum in another.

This is a maximum number - so if you enter 4, it will display 0-4 of these links (random)

Header Spin




Here you can enter spintax and WPSB will display a variation of it at the top of each post's content. The spin gets added to the post - so it won't change on a page refresh (it will stay the same for each post).

To enter the spintax, things that change are in '{}' and seperated by a '|'. so for example:
this {is|might be} spintax
would output 2 variations:
this is spintax
this might be spintax

You can nest spintax up to 10 levels deep, here's an example of nested spintax:
this {is|{might|could} be} spintax
You can nest up to 10 levels of spintax.

If using a spun header, make sure you check your spintax as WPSB won't add a spun version if it detects an error in it.

It's very important to have a spintax with lots of possible versions, as it adds to the uniqueness of the post. So make sure it's on topic, and will make sense with any content in your niche (you can add keywords which will further help).

Try to write something that would be helpful to your visitors, like an overview of the topic etc.

Footer Spin




Here you can enter spintax for WPSB to add at the bottom of each post. See above for info.

In the footer you can add a signoff, or link to a ebook. What you've got to watch out for is that you don't want any variation to look spammy in any way. In general - if it helps the visitor by providing relevant useful information, it should be fine.

If a good spin is used - this can greatly increase uniqueness of all your posts.

Title Template




Here you can add variables to the title - this can be a great way to add keywords that can help with ranking. WPSB changes the post-title, so it'll stay the same for each post once it's set (it does this when publishing a post)

The variables you can use are:
%TITLE% - this shows the post title.
%POST_50% - this shows the first 50 characters of the post.
%POST_100% - this shows the first 100 characters of the post.
%RAND_TAG% - this picks a random tag from the post to display.

Here are a few templates you could copy and paste:

%TITLE% -> %POST_50% - this would display Your Post Title -> 50 chars of post
%TITLE% | %RAND_TAG% - this would display Your Post Title | A Random Tag

You can't enter spintax here currently.


Save Settings

Make sure when you've made your changes you click the save button. If you don't click this button and change tabs, all your changes will be lost.

 

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