Autoupdating Blogs & SEO
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I have seen so many of those auto updating blogs via RSS feed that I am honestly fed up with them, and as if that is not enough I do even receive requests from clients and members on webmaster forums to create them such blogs. I tend to explain the clients why making an auto updating blog is just a waste of time, money and resources and why they should actually avoid creating such sites (before they come back on the same forum and try to sell it once they figure it really is worthless). But let me highlight some points why I personally do not like the auto updating blogs.
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Ethical use
The auto updating blogs use a plugin from where they burn your RSS feed and not only the title of your post but they will also publish your content while the author has invested time to write the post. This in simple words called stealing the content and trying to monetize it.
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No control over the content
Using auto updating blogs via feed you can’t really have the control of the content, if I get nasty and see you are monetizing MY content via Google adsense I would disable ads on my site, wrap around a big nasty post and get your account most likely disabled (only if I get to also report you to AdSense team).
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Duplicate Content
Auto updating blogs are usually new blogs created from folks that think about get-rich-quick schemes and without any work from their site involved, FAKE. Blogs like that will never manage to bring you a real online income, you’d be lucky if you can manage to make a bill pay website (and even that will require a decent amount of investment).
These three points I highlighted not only that will not permit you have good search engine rankings but it will also hurt the author of those articles to rank in the SERPs, even tho the same type of blogs help authors as they tend to link back to authors article and they use as anchor text the title of the post.
These auto updating blogs usually do have plugins that give them the option if they want to display a full post (in case you have full feed read enabled) or just the excerpt, in the worst case they will use full post which will than result in duplicate content for them only if your site has more authority than their (and we try all the time to eliminate duplicate content).
Mainly for the ethical perspective I have never tried or wanted to run a auto updating blog and see if it can really help make money online, but I strongly believe it is just a waste of time, resources and money (hosting bills and if promoting it). Since I lack on that I would be glad if you can leave a comment bellow and tell me more about your experience with auto updating blogs and their SEO performance as well as making money online through such blogs.
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I don’t have any tips on auto updating blogs but I think that you are probably right with your assumption that they won’t be good for SEO. Google really doesn’t like duplication so I can imagine it won’t like this idea either…and if something looks too good to be true……it probably is! Good luck!
Astrit – that is v bad. How do you find out if these autoupdating blogs are using your content? And what can you do to stop them?
hi SEO Halifax, indeed those type of blogs will not actually do any good, unless the owner has a big hole in his brain and heavily promotes such blog (but if he wanted a heavily promoted blog he would rather create one normal one).
hi Catherine, actually the only way I can track them is through the ping I receive via technorati, I have tried several things to prevent this from happening but so far haven’t found any real valid way to prevent this from happening. The ones I could track are from pings, I have no clue how many others might be feeding their site with my content but that don’t linkback (and hence don’t ping).
Wish I knew a solution, but I doubt it is easy to recognize and block such sites from grabbing your feed. One way it could be by simply blocking their IP to access your site (just a presumption tho). I will try to look further a bit more, and if I find something useful I will post about it here.