Autoblogging And Misconceptions

By jeffcBlogging

There is a pretty good discussion taking place over in the SitePoint forums around the topic of Autoblogging. The thread starts off like this:

What do you think about Auto Blogging to posts? Is it work getting software to do it?

Is anyone doing it with success in terms of an increase in traffic/SEO results?

Within the discussion, someone mentions that Autoblogging is content theft. The truth is, no it’s not. However, if you set up your autoblog to publish content from RSS feeds that you do not own or have the permission to use, that is content theft. Here is another misconception published in that thread:

Auto Blogging isn’t content theft. What do you think the RSS feeds are for? The writers want their content distributed.

Are you kidding me? Yes, most bloggers want their content distributed but on their terms. You can’t just go around using anyone’s RSS feed anyway you like. Lets keep in mind that the content within RSS feeds is copyrighted by the content author. Besides, do you really want to be called a human scraper?

So what I’m wondering is this. Do you autoblog? Is there any situation in where autoblogging makes sense? What are your thoughts on autoblogging?

19 thoughts on “Autoblogging And Misconceptions”

  2. Surely as long as the article remains intact and the authors details or website or source information is retained, there should be no problem? Isn’t this what these blog carnivals do?

  3. I definitively don’t agree with “autoblogging”! Even if “autoblogging” isn’t content theft in the nature of the word, I would guess that this is the case (content theft) the majority of the time! This is something I’m totally against!

  4. Thanks for the info, Its a nice brush up on a skill i haven’t used for a while! Thanks!

    really i am badly in need for such type of blog!!!!!!!!!

  5. I used to get irritated. Now I think, what will these characters say when their son or daughter asks “And how did you make all that money on the Internet, Daddy? Were you creative? Were you inventive? Did you write original material?” “Well no, all that originality and creativity and helpfulness stuff is pretty boring. You take my word for it, it’s much more fun, and easier, to take other people’s stuff and brand it as your own.You do that and you too can grow up to be a rich, boring bastard like your old man.”

  6. What I believe the purpose of auto blogs is to just get as many domains and sites out there to direct to the “domain” site and to increase it’s SERPs and PR. Simply because there is one blog scraping one of my contents every now and then, and it is all from different domains. Domains with the autoblogging feature with domains that they are trying to rank for, then linking to the main site.

    I don’t techniquely believe autoblogs are to help in anyway build more visitors, but more in use for trying to get backlinks.

  7. You do not have to steel to autoblog.

    In the SEO world there are several programs that let people submit an article, ad some spinfunctions to it to make it unique and send it out to a large number of blogs and article webistes.

    You can own one of these blogs that the articles are spread to. This happens automatically.

    I have one autoblog that collects info from article directories and youtube and yahoo answers. I have not promoted it. The salespage said I did not have to. Last month I had 1 visitor.

  8. As long as you link back and give credit to whoever wrote it I think syndicating RSS feeds are okay.

    This is wrong! Just placing a link to original content does not make anything legal.

  10. Please take my content! If you syndicate my content on your sites, I get valuable links for better SERPs.

    So, please, scrape my RSS feeds!

    Frank

  11. If someone steals my content, I don’t care. Most of the time I don’t know. I just don’t want to see my content being used on the same search engine page as mine, except only higher in the searches.

  13. I’ve always found it amusing that search engines can basically scrape everything and make huge amounts of money from it. But little old me cant scrape anything and distribute it for free and add value in the way of presenting the stuff better.

    Also there is NO such thing as content theft. There is copyright infringement but that is a whole other can of worms.
    You could argue that all search engines infringe on the copyright of for example images.
    There is also a investigation in Sweden right now if Google (and other search engines) can be considered aiding in copyright infringement.

    And also there is huge number of public twitter sites that make easy access to twitter search results and more.
    Are they also to be considered content thieves?

  14. I’ve been experimenting with this for some time. Traffic and SEO have actually been minimal, but I haven’t been doing much in the way of getting links. Because it’s not actually ‘auto’ blogging, each post is hand-picked, I’m seeing it as value-added – a service is provided. If a blogger only provides the full article feed, then that gets re-posted. If their’s is a summary feed, that’s what gets posted. The DualFeeds plugin for WordPress http://www.scratch99.com/wordpress-plugin-dualfeeds/ allows a blogger to post an additional feed (so you can have both a summary and full post feed). Given the choice I would only use summary feeds. And I provide links back to the blog and the post. I don’t remove the original bloggers ads or banners (although for some reason that does happen occasionally). I don’t really have a business plan. I have built some niche Amazon affiliate feeds (so I can throw a related book into the mix) but I have no plans to monetize much further than that until if/when organic traffic develops. But it turns out to take a lot of time to properly monitor a niche of blogs. I’ll need to find other blog readers who are passionate enough about a niche to decide they’d like to manage one of my sites.
    But what do you think? Does this make me a human scraper? Am I delusional in thinking there is a value-added by intelligently aggregating blog posts?

  16. I don’t do this, but I get it done to me. Do it once in a while or just take excerpts and I’ll ignore it, but like redwall_hp above, if you start taking everything, I’m going to do whatever I can to stop you.

  17. I don’t really have a problem with people taking the title and a short excerpt from my post, providing they link back for the full content.

    I will not tolerate content theft though. If someone is scraping the entire article, I will contact Google and Yahoo, ad networks they’re be using, and possibly their host as well.

  18. Honestly, I really don’t mind if someone takes an excerpt (a few sentences) from one of my posts and then gives me a link. In fact, a number of autoblogs do this already and it’s fine by me.

    What’s really annoying is when someone scrapes an entire post, sometimes with no credit whatsoever. So I guess what it really comes down to is not necessarily the autoblogging itself, but whether or not the entire post is scraped, as opposed to just a short excerpt with a link to the original source.

  19. I have auto blogs and I’m currently working on a “how to” series regarding auto blogging with wordpress.
    Heres the introduction so to speak.
    What is automatic blogging?

    As long as you link back and give credit to whoever wrote it I think syndicating RSS feeds are okay.
    If you only use the description or beginning of the posts then you are not any different than google news for example.

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