Autoblogging - not so easy cash

Autoblogging is a term used to describe automated blogs and automated blogging. Usually it means that instead of writing your own content you collect automatically content from other websites/blogs and post it on your own. Usually you plainly send out spider that, crawls through a collection of predetermined RSS/Atom feeds, grab the content based on keywords and posts it your blog. You decide how frequently you post to your site and which websites to collect material from and material starts to appear on your website without any effort.

If you have permit from the original author of the material to publish part of the content on your website, then of course it is not stealing. The author of the blog might be happy to get visits from your site, and also to get backlink to the original material. This might also be your own material accumulated from different sources such tweets or other social networking websites.

Normally that is though not the way that autoblogging is conducted. It is used to collect from sites without the permit of the owner. It takes different form, all from taking out few sentences (excerpt) to full content of article or post. Some times the material is even published without suggesting where the original content is coming from or mixed with news words and phrases to prevent Google to detect that the material is duplicated.

More over images are often stolen as well and published with the material. Then not only the content is stolen but the images are hotlinked increasing the load on the server where the original content is hosted, without the owner getting any thing disbursed for the material.

Of course you might just be one of those that think it is ok to steal?

If you are bringing large chunks of content from your blog Google will not index your site, at least only fraction of it. It is also unlikely that Google will favor the copied material over the original one. From a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint, autoblogs are usually not a very beneficial idea. The more original a websites content, the more likely search engines will favor your site. Google is also said to penalize duplicate content, experts debate though over how big the penalty factor really is. The autoblogged content is also most of the times missing meta tags – the description and keywords tags that go in the head of your page. This will also effect the search results.

Of course you do not have to create your own material, that saves some time. The down site of that it is unlikely that many are willing to link to website containing unoriginal and uncreative material created by some else. You will still have to do your keyword research and get people to link to you (get back-links). So even if you have the material on the website, there is still allot of work to be done.

Many webmasters are aware of autoblogging and have done preventive measures with the RSS feeds so your site will look clumsy if you add such material to your site. Some examples of the preventive measure is that webmasters place back-links to their own website, place dummy material in their RSS feed, if they know your ip-address they might send different material to your website than on their own and finally they place affiliate links in the material and monetize themselves on your blog.

I have already mentioned one good example how autoblogging might benefit you, by accumulating information from different social networking sites to your site. If you have been permitted from other website owners to publish excerpts and link back from their websites, it might prevent your site not from being updated for long time if you do not attend it.

Generally the main content of your site should be your original content and you should not believe what many sites that promise you, by having few autoblogs you are going to earn huge money, just by starting blogs and have them running on autopilot. The best way is to have a lot of original quality content.