In our minds, autoblogging was not about stealing content or spamming, it was about taking a world of content and adding value to it. But we knew to change the negative perception of autoblogging tools we had to make it much easier to play nice with those original content creators.

Over the last few years we have added a number of features to respect content ownership and also to meet the quality guidelines of search engines. Of course, anyone can bypass these features and abuse the power of AutoBlogged all they want, but we have found that most users realize the value in implementing these features.

This is how we play nice:

Small Excerpts

AutoBlogged has always created small excerpts of the content by default, even if the RSS feed contains full articles. AutoBlogged allows you to create excerpts based on a number of paragraphs, sentences, or words. While the exact definition of fair use depends on a number of factors, many would consider a few sentences to be an acceptable excerpt that does not violate the copyrights of others.

With images, AutoBlogged will by default create smaller thumbnails and gives the user the option to copy images to host them locally or to link to the original images URLs. Strangely, some content owners will get angry if you hotlink to their images, and other content owners will get angry if you make copies. AutoBlogged let’s you choose the most appropriate method.

Attribution

It is important to give credit to the content owners. The default post template creates a link after the excerpt that points to the original content. The title and anchor text are the article title and the link is followed by the search engines. What most content owners don’t realize is that this is an extremely valuable link because it is usually coming from a page that is already packed with keywords and content closely related to the subject. Anyone with link building experience knows that it is easy to build generic backlinks to a site’s homepage, but much more difficult to build deep links coming from pages with relevant content and keywords. Where possible, AutoBlogged will include the original author’s targeted categories and tags when adding the post.

AutoBlogged also has other ways to supplement attribution to the original site. It extracts the source name and description, the name of the author, links to logos and favicons, and even copyrights if they are available. All of this can be added to the post template using our post template syntax.

HTTP Retrieval Customization

AutoBlogged allows you to customize several HTTP options to respect other sites. You can set both the HTTP referrer and the user agent. This allows you to identify your site URL and, if you want, add a message to the user-agent identifying it as an aggregator.

Furthermore, you can set RSS cache times to avoid having to visit a feed URL more than necessary.

URL and Keyword Exclusion

Occasionally when running autoblogs in the past, we have been contacted by other bloggers who have kindly asked that we not include their content on our site. Wanting to accommodate these authors, we added blacklists that let you exclude articles with certain keywords, URLs, or entire domains. AutoBlogged also saves the original source as custom fields in WordPress which allows us to quickly select all the content from a particular source so we can remove it.

Publisher Meta Tags

AutoBlogged also has an option to communicate to search engines the original content URL via publisher metadata. AutoBlogged can use the syndication-source tag to indicate where the content originated. This allows search engines to better identify which sources are the original authors so they are favored search results.

Now some of you may think that doing this will hurt your own search rankings but it is important to note that autoblogs never rank well on individual content pages. After all, the article is normally just an excerpt and already links to the original content. The good will both with content owners and search engines will go much farther than the search rank of any one page.

Respecting Robots Restrictions

Depending on your configuration, AutoBlogged will normally visit the original URL to analyze the original content. When it does this, you can configure it to also take a look at any robots meta tag restrictions. If AutoBlogged sees any instructions to not index the content, it will skip that particular post.

AutoBlogged will look for meta tags directed at googlebot, msnbot, bingbot, or slurp and will respect any of these. It will also respect the noindex, noarchive, nosnippet, and none tags directed at robots.

Furthermore, we have even added our own meta tags that allows a content owner to specifically prevent copying by AutoBlogged (and we hope that other autoblogging tools will adopt this). This can be accomplished by adding one of these two meta tags:

<meta name="autoblogs" content="noindex, nosnippet, noarchive">

or

<meta name="robots" content="noautobloggers">

These meta tags will be ignored by search engines but will be respected by AutoBlogged if the user has it configured to do so.

The Future

For future versions we plan on adding features that will parse and analyze copyright notices in feeds, images, and on the site to identify and respect the content owners’ terms of use. Some licenses such as Creative Commons, for example, allow you to republish the work as long as you give proper credit. We would also like to provide a means that other sites can exclude themselves or set their terms simply via a XMLRPC ping, so they do not have to bother with tracking down and contacting the autoblog owner.

What You Can Do

We have had quite a bit of experience running autoblogs over the years and have found a number of techniques that have helped us quite a bit when it comes to working with others. First, we found that it is important that you make your web site look professional and focused on a particular topic. A blog using the default WordPress template with unrelated content will quickly get your site flagged as spam or your hosting provider hit with a DMCA takedown notice.

It is also important to provide a contact form so that users can communicate with you directly rather than having to go to your hosting company. We have found that providing a contact form always leads to polite and open exchanges with content owners.

It also helps to identify your site as an automated content aggregator, such as in a footer or an about page. There is little benefit in trying to pretend that your site is not automated and this gives you the opportunity to explain that others can communicate with you to have their site excluded.

Most of all, please do not abuse AutoBlogged’s power to create massive spam networks. This benefits no one and hurts everyone. If you are going to autoblog, get serious about it and do it right. And most of all, play nice.

Autoblogs can be successful if you avoid some of the most common beginners mistakes:

1. Copying The Whole Internet

The single most common mistake beginners make is to want to copy too much content into their blog in the hopes that it will drive more search traffic to their site. But this strategy will never last in the long run. A site that grows way too big way too fast is a huge red flag for search engines. Furthermore, too much content will dillute your keyword focus and prevents you from ranking too high in any particular niche. A large site is also very visible and more likely to get flagged as spam and certainly won’t pass a manual review. Most importantly, platforms such as WordPress simply cannot handle huge sites without a significant hardware investment.

The best strategy is to build a very targeted niche site slowly over time.

2. Not Being Useful

If you are building an autoblog, you should ask yourself if you yourself would ever bookmark the site or even subscribe to its RSS feed. If the answer is no, you are probably just building a site that provides no value and likely pollutes search engine results. Chances are this site will eventually be marked as spam and will likely get banned completely from search engines. Rather than just building content, focus on building useful content. For example, create a site that serves as a portal for a very specific topic or type of content. By making the site useful you are adding value and are much less likely to get marked as spam.

3. Copying Full Articles

Many beginners want to build their autoblog by copying entire articles from other sites. While this may drive traffic to your site for the short term, it certainly won’t take long for content authors to get annoyed and report your site to Google as spam or to issue a DMCA notice to your web host. While there are a small number of cases where using full articles is acceptable, most of the time it is simply copyright infringenment and never a good long-term strategy.

However, using short excerpts is much more courteous and usually falls under fair use which avoids copyright infringement issues. By having small excerpts from a variety of sources also helps to avoid duplicate content penalties–instead of your site being a one-for-one copy of another site, you have small excerpts from multiple sites.

Another similar mistake is to copy an entire blog. Again, this a strategy that will quickly get your site banned from search engines. Instead, pull from a variety of sources and avoid too much content from a single source.

Keep in mind that content doesn’t have to be unique to be useful; sometimes how you aggregate the content is what gives it value. Google News is nothing more than content aggregated from media outlets all over the world, but presented and sorted in a way that is useful for readers.

4. Content Spinning

One of the biggest and most amateurish of mistakes is to try to spin articles in an effort to avoid duplicate content penalties. Content spinning is the process of taking an article and swapping out certain words or phrases based on a thesaurus lookup. This strategy rarely results in proper phrases and any human who reads your content will quickly spot it as spun content; it reads like a poorly translated instruction manual. Anyone who has ever visited a site with spun content knows how fast you will hit that browser’s back button; you certainly aren’t going to be lingering long enough to be clicking on the site’s ads. Any site that uses this strategy will never pass a manual review and certainly will never remain in the search engines for long.

5. Not Giving Credit

Newcomers to autoblogging often want to remove attribution and links to the original articles, thinking that providing links will only lead users off their site. But if your site gets banned from search engines you won’t have any traffic to drive anywhere. One of the most common reasons for autoblogs getting marked as spam is because a content author reports it to the search engines. One way to prevent that is to give proper credit and link to the original content. Many bloggers will appreciate (or at least tolerate) a short excerpt that links to their site and helps their search ranking as well, especially if you ask their permission first. But if you take the content and present it as if it were your own, chances are high that others will report your site as spam.

And don’t use nofollow tags on these links. Using nofollow won’t improve your own link juice, Google has stated that nofollowed link value is just lost, but allowing search engines to follow the link will help to benefit the original content authors. The small courtesy of providing a followed link goes a long way with those who wrote the content you are using.

6. Not Being Honest

Many people go to great lengths to make their autoblog look anything but automated. But sometimes the opposite is a better strategy. There’s nothing wrong in providing a disclaimer in the blog footer that says that the site is automatically generated from articles written by others. It also helps to provide an about page that explains this in more detail and provides a contact from if a particular blogger wants to be excluded from your site.

7. Not Spending Time on Design

The design and professionalism of your autoblog will go a long way in helping you pass a manual search engine review. Buying a well-designed WordPress theme and taking the time to customize the site helps the overall presentation and helps to justify its usefulness. It is pretty easy to spot a site where little time was spent on the design and customization of the theme. On the other hand, carefully selected advertisements, widgets, outgoing links, and other finishing touches go a long way to making your site not look like spam.

Think of the Long Term Quality

Rather than building massive autoblog networks that are simply scraping content and will quickly get banned, take the time to slowly build great-looking and useful blogs that will be around for years. Sometimes it is also good to focus less on traffic and more on long-term link building to complement other higher income sites. Recent changes in Google’s ranking system does penalize some content farms and autoblogs, but a well-built site that is useful and has regular visitors is not likely to be penalized.