Yahoo Pipes

Following on from my popular “how to articles”, I want to introduce you to the world of Yahoo Pipes.

When I first went to Yahoo Pipes I was overwhelmed by what I perceived to be the complexity of the whole process. However, given a little time to be comfortable with the site and to start experimenting, I soon became familiar and confident in using Yahoo Pipes.

What I found was that I needed to know how to use the site and by writing this article, with screenshots, I am confident that you too, will get as much as I have out of making a Pipe.

I found that Yahoo Pipes actually gets quite good page rank over time and builds many backlinks to my chosen web pages.

There is an old addage that when you build a page you need to build links, in that order. Yahoo Pipes is one very strong opportunity to build links back to each page, in one easy step.

Here’s how to do it ….. let’s go__

Example of a Yahoo Pipe

I built a pipe about my hubpages as well as some of my sites I want to push along in search engine positioning.

A Pipe is built using your rss feed. The feed is gathered by Yahoo and when placed into the Pipe a page is produced that lists your pages from the rss feed.

Rss feeds, carry particularly strong linking power that should never be overlooked.

Links built to your chosen page will add to search engine positioning of each page. The stronger the link, the more weight the link will have in your search engine position.

A good link to your webpage, keyword rich, will make the difference from position 1 to 5 and for a poor link, well, sorry to say, oblivion.

Here is my Yahoo Pipe I designed for building links to my hubpages in one easy step – TerryG Yahoo Pipes on Hubpages

You will see when the Yahoo Pipe is completed that I have a dedicated page of my Hubpage rss feed. Being Yahoo and the page rank of Yahoo already, each of these individual hubpage links will gain a powerful back link.

The screenshot below is my main page where all of my pipes are listed. A point of interest here is that this is one page (one link) that leads to individual pages (another link) as well as the url’s listed as each link.

Very powerful in a linking strategy.

Let’s Build a Pipe

First sign in or sign up with Yahoo. Go to pipes.yahoo dot com and click on “Create A Pipe”. A new screen will open.

Here’s a few screenshots to show this..

On the left side you will see Fetch Feed. Click with your mouse button Fetch Feed and while holding the button down drag it into the blank work area centre screen towards the top.

When you do this a second box appears below titled “Pipe Output”.

In your Fetch Feed box paste in your rss feed.

Now in your Pipes page you simply paste the rss feed address into the Fetch Feed box. When you do this click outside the box and it will fetch the feed.

Here’s a quick screenshot ….

Let The Magic Begin

As you can see on the bottom centre edge of the Fetch Feed box there is a circle.

Now take your mouse and hold down the button and drag from that circle on the bottom of the Fetch Feed box to the top of the Pipe Output box.

Everything now comes together. The feed is migrating to your output file.

Save Your Pipe – You’re Done

Now if you go to the top right of your pipes screen you will see the SAVE button.

Click this and save your pipe. Give it a name such as “My Hubs”.

Go to the top centre of screen on your pipes page and click on “Run Pipe”.

There is your Yahoo Pipe with your hubpages RSS feed ready to go, but wait, I have one or two quick tips for you.

Tips and Tricks

Now that you have built your Pipe on your sites presence rss feed there is one or more tricks to do. I always have a trick and this is no exception.

Trick One – Now firstly my Pipe is titled “test” just for the purpose of this hub whereas yours will be your chosen title. Often the title is an opportunity to put in your keyword such as I did for my swimwear site. I called the pipe my keyword for the site.

Trick Two – See on your Pipe page where it says “Click to add description”, well this is where you will describe what your site is about and an opportunity for you to grab a visitors attention.

Trick Three – Underneath “click to add description” is the url of your pipe. Edit this by placing in your keyword or keyword phrase and click save. Powerful strategy to have your keyword in the url.

Trick Four - At the left centre of your pipe page is a section titled “Tags”. Add your tags that are applicable to your rss feed titles.

Trick Five – Copy your unique url and promote it with social bookmarking, and every other method of promotion you can think of. Like link to it from blog networks, put it on your sites, add it to your email signature, oh the list goes on.

Trick Six – Your ready to publish. Click the “Publish” button and your pipe is now out in websphere where it will gather and build you links. In time your pipe page will gather page rank making each link more powerful.

Final Word

This is a very basic tutorial on how to build backlinks to your page offerings using Yahoo Pipes.

Yahoo Pipes is a very complex beast where many different pipes can be used such as filters, rules and feed fetching.

That is all very complicated and to write a article encompassing the whole Pipes experience would be twenty metres in length.

Try it out. You will get comfortable with the process and can make it work for you. If you want to know more then Yahoo Pipes has video tutorials that walk you through each process, and also there’s YouTube for more information.

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