How many times you came across an automated blog? How many times you have read about a new WordPress plugin that works automatically to publish posts on your blog with out you do any effort? Could this be a new business opportunity?
In discussion forums you will find everything possible, people who waste your time, and other who really gain your respect. I was in a discussion forum today and I found people talking about a new WordPress plugin that allow you to create automated content by pulling articles based on specific keywords and publish them to a blog, basically the idea is to use this blog for making money by display Google AdSense ads, but I wonder why no body mentioned the possibility of having duplicated content and how is could hurt!
I just don’t want to link to the plugin page not to give it any credit, but you can find lots of these plugins simply by searching.
Keywords or RSS feeds?
The idea of getting the articles or the posts is by two ways, the first is pulling them from article directories, and the second way it to grab the articles from RSS feeds and re-post them to the automated blog.
Trackbacks from the darkness of the internet
Of course all of us knows about this awful way of content creation, and probably you will remove these ugly trackbacks you are getting all the time when you discover it’s from one of those automated blogs. I personally hate it when some blogs from the darkness of the internet links back to my blog, I personally consider it a link from a bad neighborhood.
AutoBlogging.. is it a way of creating a successful blog?
What really annoy me is the creators of these plugin convince buyers of the paid version that they will earn money easily by installing the plugin on their blogs and do nothing more than that! Because everything is automatically done! And they -of course- do NOT mention content duplication, and they will not talk about it because this will hurt their sales, they even promote automated blogging as it’s an innovative tool to help keep the content fresh!
Did they ever think about how much duplicated content hurts?
Automated content creation
Just pay attention that we are talking here about automated blogging, not about automated content creation, and I am actually against both ways, because at the end both ways can lead to content duplication, because there is no reason to duplicate content 100s of times on each blog.
SEO experts teach these ways, and use these content generating software that allow you to create 50 different versions or more of one original article by changing a few words and paragraphs placements. Then simply you can submit these articles to web directories and convince them all that these are original and unique content.
A message to auto generated content blogs owners
I just want to tell to everyone who is using this way that -Don’t forget- people who works on developing search engines is working day and night to discover your 50 auto generated articles and they will send them to the basement of the search results sooner or later.
If you don’t believe me then read what’s on Google Webmaster Central support pages about little or no original content.
From the page: “Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other auto-generated pages that don’t add any value to users”
Conclusion and personal opinion
Blogging should be about writing original content all the time, this is case you are trying to give value to readers and you are planning a long life for your blog. I don’t recommend automated blogs and content generating software for anyone, it’s a very bad human behavior, and it’s a way to to destroy the value of the internet, search engine results and making money online niche reputation, duplicated content waste our time and efforts on the internet looking for something not said yet so many times, and it’s not the right way to create a successful blog or website.
This is absolutely the most ridicules way to earn money online, automated blogs in my opinion is the worst idea for a blog, and I dare you to give me one example of a successful blog by any assets using automatic content generation WordPress plugins.
What about you?
What you think about automated blogs, and unique content generators? Are they good or bad? Can bloggers think about it as a new business opportunity?