AutoBlogged is a WordPress plugin that automatically builds content in your WordPress blog using one or more external RSS or Atom feeds. AutoBlogged is a fast yet powerful tool for building a wide variety of web sites, such as portals, news aggregators, topic watchers, popular article finder, autoblog gallery, or simply an alternative for domain parking.

Getting Started with AutoBlogged

Configuration and Usage

• Main Page
• Edit Feeds Page
• Tag Options Page
• Settings Page
• Filtering Page

Advanced Topics

• AutoBlogged Tagging Engine
• Working with Tags and Categories
• Post Template Reference

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Tags: autoblog automatic blog posts blog builder blog generator domain parking news aggregators

Autoblogging is the term we use to automatically create content for blogs, as opposed to manually writing individual posts. In the case of AutoBlogged, you can create posts based on the contents of another RSS feed. Since you can get RSS feeds on just about anything, you can easily find content to automatically add to your WordPress blog. For example, you could get a feed from Google Blog Search that returns articles written by other bloggers on a particular topic. These articles will appear on your blog as short excerpts with a link attributing the original source.

Technorati.com and Google News are both examples of essentially how an autoblog looks.

Autoblogs are useful for many things, but they are a great way to aggregate articles on a particular niche topic for your blog. By pulling feeds from multiple sources and using smart searches and filtering you can provide valuable portals to your niche topic. Autoblogs can also work well to build blogs from multiple affiliate feeds or to augment your own content.

Autoblogs ensure keyword-rich, fresh content that will greatly improve your search engine results.

Are Autoblogs the Same as Splogs?

While many people do use autoblogs as spam blogs–or splogs–autoblogging itself is not spamming. Splogs are spam in the sense that they are spamming search engines to build backlinks or drive traffic to affiliate links, increase ptc ad clicks, or even to spread malware. Splogs quickly get blacklisted on search engines and work based on volume and rapidly creating new splogs. Splogs are a blackhat SEO technique that do not produce quality long-term results and are generally annoying for anyone using a search engine.

Are Autoblogs the Same as Scrapers?

Scraping is similar to autoblogging in the sense that it uses content from other web sites. Scraping, however, is different in that it uses a significant amount of content from targeted sites and often is combined with rewriting techniques to obscure the original content while maintaining the topical context.

Autoblogging is not about stealing content, but rather sifting through, aggregating, and linking to the world’s content to create added value.

Here are some demo sites we have built with AutoBlogged:

http://mspatchwatch.com

http://advertiserguide.us

http://idolz.us

Here are the winners of our 2009 AutoBlogging contest:

http://equineartist.info/artists

http://www.news.magznetwork.com

http://iplseries.com

The whole concept of an autoblog is using content written or owned by others. Because of that, copyrights are always an important consideration. We really can’t give legal advice on copyright and fair use, and even if we could those laws are very much up to interpretation. Fair use for the most part is decided on a case-by-case basis so there aren’t any fixed rules. Even if you are clearly in the realm of fair use, that doesn’t mean someone can’t try to sue, incurring substantial legal fees ……

Some people ask us if AutoBlogged can rewrite or spin articles to avoid duplicate content penalties when adding posts from other RSS feeds. Although you can do some simple rewriting using the Search and Replace feature it is pretty limited and we generally do not recommend it for other than simple substitutions.

Article spinning is a technique of rewriting words in an article to avoid duplicate content penalties in search engines while maintaining the basic meaning of the article. Most article spinning techniques involve randomly replacing certain words or phrases based on a database of synonyms

We generally do not recommend article spinning. Although the content may look different to a search engine, a human can easily spot a spinned article and sometimes synonyms may produce unexpected results and actually hurt search engine placement. Furthermore, there is a fine line between autoblogging and plagiarizing. Using small content excerpts of someone else’s article to provide added value (as in the case of Google News or Technorati) is generally an accepted (or at least tolerable) practice.

However, spinning someone else’s content to plagiarize and avoid detection can quickly get your site flagged as spam and significantly (and sometimes permanently) penalized in the search engines. Furthermore, article spinning gives autobloggers in general a bad name and many are quick to label all autoblogs as spam sites.

For the most part, autoblogs are not affected by duplicate content penalties, especially if you only use fair excerpts and pull from a variety of sources. In fact, using small excerpts can improve your keyword density which often results in ranking higher than the original articles.

Having said that, if you still wish to avoid duplicate content detection, one tool we recommend is the WP Uniquefier Plugin, which does not affect the readability of an article. WP Spinner is another WordPress plugin, although we have not tested this.

A common myth perpetuated in the SEO world is that you need to be careful with duplicate content to avoid penalties from search engines. The fact is that the Internet is full of duplicate content. Press releases, syndicated news stories, newsgroup and mailing list archives, and open source content all produce massive amounts of duplicated content. For example, take a popular Wikipedia entry and drop an excerpt into a search engine. You will see that many people use this content and often these pages rank higher than the original Wikipedia entry.

Consider that it would be a massive computing effort for any search engine to identify all pages on the Internet that are even 90% alike.  When you consider each web site has unique headers, footers, sidebars, and comments, chances are your site would be more like 50% similar to any other site even if you copied most of the articles from that site. Furthermore, if your autoblog pulls from many sources your site really is not a duplicate of any single site anymore. You can rest assured that there is no automatic detection that your site contains partial duplicate content from multiple sources.

However, we have seen many autoblogs that would never pass a manual inspection. If your site looks like spam then chances are that it will be penalized or even banned from the search engines. The problem is that if you aren’t courteous to other webmasters, it is really easy for them to report your site as spam, triggering a manual review by the search engines. If your web site looks like it does nothing more than steal content from others, chances are they will penalize you for being nothing other than duplicate content.

Here are some tips to help avoid any search engine penalties:

Add Value – Keep in mind, that there are many big web sites that are nothing but duplicated content.  Technorati, Google News, and many other sites are nothing but fancy autoblogs. If your site does nothing but repeat the content of a couple other blogs, you can expect to fail a manual review. We really don’t need more sites like that on the Internet. Create your autoblog with a purpose and give the user real value. A professional design and a personal touch can also make a big difference when it comes to manual reviews.

Be Courteous – The most important thing is to not anger other webmasters because they are they ones most likely to report you to the search engines. We find that it is best to not take every single article from another site without asking them permission. It is better to use the search-based feeds to pull your articles from a variety of different sites rather than directly pulling the feed from one or two specific blogs. You would be surprised to find that many bloggers are willing to let you pull excerpts from their feeds, especially if your site looks professional and has good page rank.

Still, you may find that some authors will complain even if you pull just one excerpt from their site. Although with just an excerpt you are probably safe from a legal perspective, but it is always best to show courtesy by apologizing and placing their site on the URL Blacklist in AutoBlogged so their articles don’t appear.

Make sure your web site has a way to contact you so that other webmasters will come to you first rather than just reporting you as spam to the search engines.

Fair Usage - When pulling articles from another site, be sure to keep your excerpts short and respect the copyrights of others. Some feeds include copyright notices and you can even include those in your post template. Always give credit to your sources and link to the original article. We also like to include a footer and about page that explains that the site is an autoblog and that the content was written by others. It is best to not take full articles, attempt to rewrite or spin articles, or use other blackhat methods that make it look like you are hiding something.

The User Experience - Although their are many algorithms that search engines use to rank content, it ultimately comes down to user experience. The whole point of having penalties is to prevent spammers from manipulating the system. If you build your site with real users in mind, and provide real value, chances are you won’t ever face any search engine penalties.

If you are seeing posts with extended characters such as †or  or � there are several things that can cause this. The most common causes are

• Multiple encoding of the same characters, most often seen with quotes and apostrophes.
• Mismatched input and output encoding of certain extended characters, most often seen with curly quotes, long dashes (em-dash), ellipses, etc.

Often you will see these appear when you are combining feeds from multiple sources through an external aggregater or external filter such as Yahoo pipes. Misconfigured web sites as well as some WordPress themes and plugins can also cause this. You might also see these characters appear with certain character sets shown on certain browser versions.

Character encoding problems are very common and are often seen in feed aggregators such as Google Reader.

The Problem

The characters appear because the current character set encoding incorrectly displays a character value. There are a number of different character sets used in data processing and each character set has unique availability and numbering of localized and international characters. ASCII, ISO 8859-2, Windows-1250, and UTF-8 are all common character sets, each with their own encoding schemes.

Because each character encoding is different a value encoded with one character set will display incorrectly with another character set. Since many character sets are extensions of ASCII, most of the basic Latin characters will show up correctly but will not correctly convert special characters such as curly quotes or long dashes. So while a long dash might appear correctly with one character set, in another character set it might be an upside down exclamation point, an accented letter, or not even exist at all.

Here is an example of incorrect character set conversion:

Blog » Blog Archive » Example Post

The more common problem is when a character is encoded or escaped for processing but never converted back. Because certain characters have special meaning with programming languages, SQL statements, scripting languages, and browsers, most often you will see text escaped or encoded before processing. When escaped or encoded text is escaped or encoded again, the result is an incorrect character when decoded.

Here is an example of double encoding or escaping:

‘This Title€™ Isn’t Displaying Correctly

Unfortunately, there is no easy solution that we can do on our end to fix this problem that will work for everyone. We can’t just filter out those characters because that messes up non-English characters that are meant to be there. We can’t do a simple charset conversion because we don’t always know the original charset and we also don’t know if the text has already been converted one or more times. Furthermore, some characters such as curly quotes simply don’t exist in common character sets such as ISO-8859-1.

To make matters worse, when you aggregate multiple feeds using something like Yahoo! Pipes, there could be multiple character sets combined in a single feed. And finally, the problem could be occurring after AutoBlogged processes the post by a mismatched character set in the database, web server, or WordPress theme.

Here are a few things you can try that might help:

• First, make sure the problem occurs on actual posts. Sometimes these characters show up when you preview the feed processing, but not on the blog itself.
• Try a different WordPress theme.
• Try the plugin mentioned here: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/ultimate-solution-to-weird-utf-cha… or here:http://kaloyan.info/blog/proekti/wordpress-proekti/wp-utf8-sanitize-plugin/
• Check your feeds at feedvalidator.org and also make sure the charset is correct.
• Try specifically defining your web site’s output character set with html meta tags.
• Open your wp-config.php file, find this line: define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′); and comment it out like this: //define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);

Ultimately, you may find that some feeds just aren’t usable which does happen.

One solution we have resorted to in some extreme cases is to do a simple search and replace from within AutoBlogged. To do this, copy the unwanted character to the search for field and leave the replace with field empty.

We expect to have a working solution for this problem by our next release.

Latest Release: 2.5.74 – August 12, 2009

Change Log

Version 2.6.1 – Jan 16, 2009

• Fixed issue where feeds marked for manual processing were not processing
• Fixed ab_logmsg error
• Fixed implode error with tags
• Fixed image attachments to show up in media library
• Disabled showing of debug log messages on RSS feeds
• Improved processing of custom namespaces
• Fixed WP 2.9 tags box
• Fixed WP 2.9 categories selection
• Added support for DIY Themes
• Added support for Thesis theme
• Improved support for Arthemia theme
• Improved image detection for incorrect MIME types

Version 2.5.74 – August 12, 2009

• Added more debugging code for loading extra files
• Added additional WordPress hooks to fix cron issue
• Added code to handle mysql_real_escape_string failures
• Fixed additional problems with tag and category UI elements
• No longer silently drops mismatched post template variable

Version 2.5.73 – July 30, 2009

• Fixed bug that caused empty URL on RSS feeds

Version 2.5.72 – July 16, 2009

• Fixed Yahoo! API tagging feature
• Fixed ab_logMsg error, improved error handling for logging code
• Changed format of zip file to allow uploading and installing directly from WP
• Updated SQL statement for creating database which caused problems in some environments
• Fixed tags box for WP 2.8 admin panel
• Fixed categories box for WP 2.8 admin panel
• Fixed htmlspecialchars_decode backwards compatibility issue

Version 2.5.61 – June 1, 2009

• Fixed WP 2.8 compatibility
• Fixed implode() error on line 1428

Version 2.5.01 – May 27, 2009

• Added detection of html-encoded image references in feed content.
• Fixed handling of custom namespace elements.
• Misc error handling and debugging fixes.

Version 2.4.25 – April 1, 2009

• Fixed several tagging bugs
• Improved exception handling and debugging
• Fixed double brackets bug when using search/replace
• Fixed long title truncation bug
• Fixed filtering bug with empty filters
• Fixed image and thumbnail custom field bugs with various themes
• Added support for Press75 On Demand theme

Version 2.4.23

• Fixed URL parsing error with PHP4
• Renamed simplepie.inc to simplepie.php
• Changed ALLOW_ALL_TAGS behavior to include all html attributes
• Added additional dupe check based on post name
• Added check for wp_insert_user function and error message for old versions of WP
• Import tags from any media thumbnails
• Fixed PHP4 error: parse_url() expects exactly 1 parameter, 2 given…
• Fixed array_rand error on line 1447.
• Fixed search/replace to also seach video and image fields
• Removed extra custom fields added to each post
• Added support for WPThemesMarket Magazine News theme
• Added support for Press75 themes
• Improved custom RSS module handling to allow hierarchical namespaces
• Fixed last processed and next scheduled times in sidebar in WP 2.7
• Fixed link to modify thumbnail settings in WP 2.7
• Added additional entries to tags.txt and notags.txt files
• Made adjustments to default post template
• Improved WooThemes support
• Custom fields can now override any other field in the post such as Title or Date
• Fixed “Call to a member function get_attribution() on a non-object” error on line 1002
• Fixed bug where category named “Object” appears
• Now assigns only the default category when no category selected for the feed

Version 2.4.22

• Upgraded SimplePie to version 1.1.3
• Fixed fsockopen “Using $this when not in object context” bug
• Added undocumented settings ALLOW_OBJECT_AND_EMBED_TAGS, ALLOW_FORM_TAGS,  ALLOW_FRAME_TAGS, ALLOW_SCRIPT_TAGS, ALLOW_ALL_TAGS, ENCODE_INSTEAD_OF_STRIP,  FORCE_FEED
• Added code to automatically handle encoded html.
• Remove unmatched variables from post template.
• Fixed broken process and preview links in sidebar in WP 2.7 UI.
• Improved code to identify images in any feed field.
• Added code to block certain images such as stars in youtube feeds.
• Fixed bug with saving images locally when filename is invalid.
• Custom fields now override any value set during post processing.
• Added support for WooThemes.

Version 2.4.19 release candidate

• Fixed version not displaying bug in WP pre-2.7 UI.
• Fixed Missing argument error in WP 2.7.

Version 2.3.418 beta

• Added support for WorPress 2.7 user interface
• Added debug.png icon
• Minor change in handling of debug messages
• Added additional error handling for image_resize

Version 2.3.381 beta

• Added new debugging error messages
• Fixed bug parsing multiple templates
• Fixed bug where %author% variables not populated
• Changed type for search/replace database fields to prevent truncation
• Added additional dupe checking code
• Improved image type verification
• Fixed support request form
• Improved author matching procedure
• Fixed bug parsing two variables with a colon between them in feed template
• Improved video handling, disabled WordPress post filtering
• Improved image handling
• Added image path variable to support Arthemia theme
• Removed page_content from post custom fields
• Fixed Yahoo Tags code
• Post templates now allow literal brackets by using double brackets: [[ and ]]
• Image urls in %content% variable now point to locally cached images
• Made fsockopen errors silent
• Added check for debug.log permissions
• Changed check for updates to occur no more than once every 12 hours

How to Get Technical Support

	Online Manual Read our online manual for basic usage and how-to information.
	Knowledge Base Our online knowledge base contains articles addressing many common issues.
	Support Forums Get support from and share information with other AutoBlogged users.
	E-Mail Support Personalized support by sending an e-mail to support@autoblogged.com or use this form.
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