Writing content sucks. So what if there were a way to generate locale-specific content (and ads!) using a template and a few small tricks? The idea is to write a small amount of content as a template, then populate that template using a database. The source code I’m providing here uses a “database” (really just a list) of US states, cities and keywords. These three variables are used to generate both a search-engine friendly URL and the content that shows location-specific ads as sponsored results.
This code is 2 years old, but shows a few interesting tricks like putting keywords into subdomains and then extracting them. It generates a site with thousands of pages using only one php script and some html templates. The URLs generated are SEO friendly, and distinct titles and meta descriptions are generated on each page. I used the following URI scheme:
http://<state>.<domain>/<keyword>/<city>/
You can change this by modifying the rewrites in the .htaccess file, and the getState, getCity and getKeyword methods in util.php. The subdomains actually worked really well in terms of indexing – Google loved them. Obviously you’ll need to write new templates, too. One modification that would really help is to have multiple templates, or make the templates PHP-based so they can generate different content for all the leaf pages at the very bottom (i.e. that include keyword, city and state.) The content is so obviously generated that it might not even get indexed these days. If you want to actually use this code, just search for YOURDOMAIN and the word “widget” (case insensitive) to find all the places you need to modify. If you’re super stuck, email me and I’ll try to give you a hand. All I would ask is that you let me know where you’ve used it and how [un]successful it is.
Here’s the madlibs site generator source code.