Automatic blogging, the process of automating a blog to literally update itself with content, is either a very useful traffic building method or a dishonest black hat SEO spam trick depending on your point of view.
I’m going to put the legitimacy debate to one side for the moment since, like most methods, automatic blogging can be employed for both honest and dishonest means. Generating a news blog that takes it’s information from public news channels is, presumably, acceptable. But scraping someone else’s RSS feeds without permission and regurgitating them clearly isn’t.
Many automatic blogging tools claim to be able to get your blog indexed by the search engines very quickly, even overnight in some cases, by generating content multiple times a day and pinging a range of services each time.
I can see the attraction. You build one blog, set it to automatically update a few times a day every day and then leave it to run. The following day you build another blog and set it to update in the same way. Next day, same thing. And so on and so forth.
It won’t be long before you’ve got a lot of blogs. If your host has one click wordpress installs it’s going to take you under 30 minutes to get each blog configured and up and running. If you wanted to you could probably have a veritable army of blogs in just a couple of days.
Of course, the success of these blogs depends entirely on how you choose to use the automated blog posting software. If you steal content from other people you’ll probably get banned from google in a week or so, and you don’t want that to happen. If, on the other hand, you use the software responsibly you could potentially create genuinely useful sites. Indeed, I know of a couple of Mac news websites that simply pull results from other Mac news blogs, with their permission of course. As long as the content creators are happy for their content to be syndicated there are no moral or legal issues to wrestle with.
Later today I’m going to install wordpress on a domain name I picked up a little while ago and power it with some blog automation software. Tomorrow I’ll post the results and we can see how much traffic, if any, can be generated in a 24 hour period and what, if any, position the site has achieved in Google for a few related search phrases and keywords.
I’m interested to learn what you think of this sort of thing. Don’t worry, I’m not going to suddenly start building wave after wave of spam blogs, far from it. I’m just very curious to see whether or not blog automation can be used to generate legitimate, useful and profitable blogs. If it can, then if placed in the right hands, potentially everyone wins.
this is wat easy with wpmu. you could create 200k blogs from one install; all with different domains. seriously.
I’m glad someone is opening this topic up for discussion. Too many bloggers immediately jump to the conclusion that automated blogging is only for spammers. Thats like saying cars were invented to cause accidents. It’s all about how this sort of software is used.
This is a pretty interesting idea. I’m very curious what the results will be. I can imagine this definitely being an easy way to generate some business with very little overhead.
On a sidenote. The OG Upstart Blogger design has really been hitting the spot for me over the last week or so.
“If it ain’t broke…”
— Allan
Interesting topic and idea. I’m anxious to see what your results are!
I have a few running right now, and although they create very little traffic compared to my manual blogs, they do see some income from relevant product links in their niche. Now that I’m writing about it, I probably need to take a look and see what I can revise to drive more traffic.
@Curtis Earl,
Do you mean actual domains or sub-domains?
I’m interested in this topic as I was running my first autoblogs for my own in this days. Altough I haven’t found a software that runs the routines automatically without my interaction on wordpress up to now. I would love to hear which software/plugins you are using and if they run totally on their own.
Thanks in advance.
ciao
alexander
@indielab -there’s a WPMU script out there - i won’t link to it to avoid abuse, but its where you’d expect it to be - that’ll create wordpress subdomains en mass from an excel spreadsheet. combine that with a little multisite manager magic and an outdated copy of the autoblog plugin, and you’ve got a recipe of spam, brother.
Autoblogs are really a head turner when it comes to efficiency and performance.