I got this question from Primal in regards to my post on Building Mininets

Eli,

I like the post and your entire site. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. One thing confuses me about this particular tactic. Where are you getting the content from? You mentioned Audioscrobbler and Youtube API but I am not focusing on a music niche. The “widely available car db” sounds more like something I could use. Can you say where you would get something like this from? Also is there any reason why I should use customized pages instead of a CMS like Wordpress to generate these kinds of sites?

Upon a glancing read this question seems to focus too much on the exact example used in the post. Yet if you really read the multipart question thoroughly and get to its core it’s a FANTASTIC question that really needs an answer in more depth than what I would put in a comment response. The mininet building post isn’t about how to use APIs and RSS feeds to get content. Nor is it about creating a custom CMS or doing multiple installs of the same site structure (I covered that in depth in my SEO Empire post and called them ANT Scripts). The real down to brass tax gem behind the technique is understanding how to do Addon Domain Spam via environmental variables such as HTTP_HOST to create a lot of sites from a single install of ANYTHING. I’m absolutely a firm believer that addon domain spam is the future of webspam. Subdomains had their day and now its time for figuring out creative ways to create a ton of unique sites from a single platform. This doesn’t always have to be done through addon domains and as mentioned in the comments can be done through other ways such as editing the httpd.config. For now though I wanted to focus on the basics such as using addon domains and if you’d like to go cheap about it subdomains, and let the SEO ingenuity naturally evolve from there.

To answer your question yes you can use databases to help with the content for these sites. Check out my Madlib Sites post for some great ideas on how to accomplish that and use databases. As for the second part YES you can use other CMS’ such as Wordpress!

How To Use Wordpress To Do Addon Domain Spam I got several emails from people asking how to create a wordpress plugin to accomplish this technique as well as a comment from the longtime reader PhatJ. I realize at first thought this sounds like a complicated process to be able to convert wordpress over to being able to read multiple addon domains and treat them as multiple installs and probably require some sort of plugin being created, but as with most things the simple solution is often the best.

The easiest and most effective way to convert any CMS to be used for addon domains that I’ve found is to simply edit the config files. No joke, that’s seriously usually all it ever takes. In my wordpress wp-config.php file I grabbed the line that declared the database:

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘database1′);

I replaced it with a simple IF ELSE statement to check for the domain and define the appropriate database:

**if ( $_SERVER[“HTTP_HOST”] == ‘domain1.com’ ) { define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘database1’); } elseif($_SERVER[“HTTP_HOST”] == ‘domain2.com’){ define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘database2’); }else { define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘database1’); } **

Then I just pull each database in the browser or mass wordpress installer script and setup each blog as if it was separate.

To show you it in action I put up a single Wordpress install on a subdomain on Bluehat. I then added a second database and put that code into the wp-config.php. Looking at each you’d have no idea they were a single wordpress install. See for yourself

Domain 1: http://addtest1.bluehatseo.com Domain 2: http://addtest2.bluehatseo.com

Thanks for your question Primal!