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.

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Tags: Autoblogging scrapers scraping spam splogs

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.

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.

The quality of your autoblog highly depends on the feeds that drive your site. Poor quality feeds can quickly fill your site and certainly will give visitors the impression that your site is spam.

So here are some links to help you out:

Yahoo! Pipes – This is by far the most powerful RSS aggregator with great filtering capabilities. You can even pull content from a CSV file and convert it to a RSS feed.

MySyndicaat – Similar to Yahoo! Pipes. Easier to use but not nearly as powerful.

BoardTracker – Allows you to search discussion boards and save that search as a RSS feed. I use this to watch forums for people looking for an autoblog script!

Feed43 – Another powerful service that lets you extract content from a regular HTML page and convert it to a RSS feed. I have used this in the past to pull posts from forums that do not support RSS. Its a little complicated at first but once you get used to it, you won’t be able to live without this. Recently I made myself a feed to monitor the “wanted to buy” forums on a number of domain boards, fed those feeds into Yahoo! Pipes for some filtering, then into my RSS reader.

Contest Announcement

NOTICE: This contest is now over, watch our site for future contest announcements!

Have you built a great-looking site using AutoBlogged or are you using our script in some unique and clever way? We are now scouring the web to find the best AutoBlogged sites out there and are excited to announce our first ever autoblogging contest!

From now until April 30, 2009 we are taking entries for the best autoblog sites out there. One winner and two runners up will receive hundreds of dollars in cash and prizes!

Prizes

First Place – One first place winner will win the prizes below (valued at almost $1000),

	A Visa gift card for USD $200
	A developer’s license for one premium WordPress theme at WooThemes.com ($150 value)
	A license for one premium WordPress theme at Press75.com ($75 value)
	A license for the Movie Automator plugin at GoSCRIPT.net ($15 value)
	A lifetime Developer license of AutoBlogged (includes all future versions) ($395+ value)
	A link to your web site from the home page at www.autoblogged.com ($150 value)

Runners Up – Two runners up will receive the following prizes (valued at almost $350)

	A Visa gift card for USD $50
	A license for the WP Uniquefier plugin at GoSCRIPT.net ($15 value)
	A lifetime Multi-Site license of AutoBlogged (includes all future versions) ($129+ value)
	A link to your web site from the home page at www.autoblogged.com ($120 value)

How We Judge

All winners will be chosen by a panel of judges consisting of one judge from AutoBlogged.com and three independent judges not affiliated with AutoBlogged.com.

The winners of the contest will be decided based on the following criteria:
• Overall creativity, originality, and concept – we want to be amazed.
• Creative and innovative use of AutoBlogged features – we want to show off what AutoBlogged can really do.
• General usefulness and value of the site – we don’t want to fill up the Internet with junk and we want to show that autoblogs aren’t just spam sites.
• Visual presentation, and usability – we want the site to look great and be easy to navigate.

For more information, please see our Contest Rules.

Note that this isn’t a design contest, the emphasis here is on the original and creative use of AutoBlogged, but we want to see sites that we are proud to show off as AutoBlogged example sites. Since this isn’t a design contest you are free to use any WordPress theme you want. Here are some premium WordPress themes we recommend.

Example Sites

To get things started we set up a few autoblogs of our own to show what kind of stuff we are looking for.

http://mspatchwatch.com

http://advertiserguide.us

http://idolz.us

http://windows2008security.com

http://quickgardening.com

We also suggest you visit the FAQ, Knowledge Base, and Tips section of our support forum. We will be adding new tips to that regularly during our contest.

How to Enter

1. The contest ends at 12:00 am MST (GMT -0700) on April 30, 2009.
2. Read the Contest Rules.
3. To enter, please create a new post in this forum

Sponsors

We would like to give a special thank you our contest sponsors!

Duplicate Posts

• Duplicate Filtering – To prevent duplicates articles from appearing in your blog, AutoBlogged can check for existing articles based on the title or the original URL. The options you choose depends on the type of feeds you are using. Some feeds, such as Flickr feeds, often have duplicate titles for different pictures so you may not want to use the title for duplicate checking. Other times you may have multiple sites that syndicate the same articles. In those cases you might want to check for duplicates based on both the title and the link URL.

Blacklists

• URL Blacklists – You can use this setting to prevent adding feeds from certain domains or based on any portion of the URL. When AutoBlogged processes feeds it compares the URL to all items in the URL blacklist. If any of the blacklisted URL sequences appear in the original link it will skip that post.
• Keywords Blacklists – This setting is to keep your blog clean and on topic by blocking any posts that contain certain words. You can use this to block spam content or to prevent certain types of content, such as forum posts, from appearing on your blog. Note that unlike feed-level filters, the Keywords Blacklist is compared against the original content if available.