Feb

Autoblogging, Scrapers & Full RSS Feed Importers

I recently received an email asking me about what I thought of full Text RSS feed autocontent generators. I know this is a popular way to “game” the search engines, but here is my answer to this question (and probably an answer that those who want shortcuts won’t like. )

Short answer: I wouldn’t do it.

Long answer:

On Jan 28th of this year Google sent out an update that really makes it’s point clear about this. It does not want auto-posted content and “scraped” content which is content taken from some other sources entirely.

It really depends on how many posts, where they were taken from, what credit is given authors and what % of these articles make up the entire blog.

It is ok to use the occasional article with proper credit given (i.e. ezinearticles.com) but many of the scrapers take content off of other peoples blogs and use it as their own, which I personally would not do. I would consider it copyright infringement if ever done to me as I usually have a copyright statement on my sites. (BTW, I did try one on a site a few years ago when they were very popular, but felt scummy about it and it didn’t take me long to quit. )

The only way I would use it is to add articles from article directories and to make sure to keep the author box, or if I was importing some of my own content, or content that I was given permission to use. Also I would make sure to make them a small part of the overall site.

This used to be very popular (and still is) and it did work well for rankings, but Google is only going to get tougher & tougher on it so over the long term I personally wouldn’t advise it.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/google-cracks-down-on-spammers-and-scrapers/

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66361

Take care,

Marilyn