What actually is an autoblog?

Let’s start with what exactly is a Blog.

Blog is short of weB log. It can be your diary, your notes, things you want to share or something that interests you. You may share your opinion on a movie you recently watched, share piece of advice for something you did or generally just write your research in one neat page so everyone can benefit from It.

Some of the bloggers out there, including myself insert advertisement on their pages. Those advertisements generate some income every time someone is interested in them and clicks to check how much it will cost or to get additional information. This way, the blogger that shared something that can help his readers can get some small amount of money (cents actually). It is called monetizing or

Blogging for money. What does it have to do with Autoblog and what exactly is It? An Autoblog plugin such as WP Robot, Autoblogged, or DatafeedR are not actually generating any new material for you. It is impossible. Cannot be done. It would be one of the best artificial intelligence software if It did. No. It is actually scraping thousands of RSS feeds, Yahoo! answers, WebHowTo’s and many other daily updated internet resources and copies new articles matching your chosen category to your own blog. It’s one of the new trends in making money online. It is of course…

Stealing

Remember how I defined blog monetizing? The original publisher is posting articles with attached ADs inside or beside them. The Autoblog software is attaching your ADs in their place. The original publisher does not get a single penny for his article from your blog. It is like getting a bestselling book and reselling it for profit, claiming you are the author. Suppose the original author has a small blog with Page rank 1 and your page rank is 5. Your blog will appear before his/hers in the search results. And he will lose possible readers because of you. His hours of trying to create a successful blog will be in vain. And even worse:

Some of the * Autoblog * plugins don’t even leave a link to the original article. It’s pure thievery. And as one of the bloggers I found in the network said:

It is a small world.

It is very easy to catch if one of your best articles that generate few cents per click is copied. Mark a random passage of few sentences and search them in Google. If anyone had stolen them – you will have them as result 1 HOPEFULLY after your original article.

License your work! Even a widely open license as Creative Commons allow you some hammering. Everyone can use your work as long as there is a link pointing to the original article or a credit to the original author.

You may send a note to the “blogger” and ask him to remove the article or cutting some part of It and linking to your site for the rest. You can also try my few

anti Autoblog tricks.

• Use hidden text. Mark this with your mouse —> Original work Stoill “m0rd0r” Barzakov, visit www.m0rd0r.eu for more <—— The scraper Autoblog software will copy it without the tags and it will appear black-on-white somewhere in the article the “blogger” took from you without asking. The bad part is -> there will not be actual URL pointing to your site and you will not benefit from his page rank. It can alarm his readers that he is lazy thief though.
• Do not enable full RSS feeds. Even if a scrapper Autoblog software aims at your RSS feed – they will only get the heading of the article.
• If you want to provide your readers with full RSS feeds – use Yoast’s RSS footer plugin to insert links to your own article and some heavy AdSense or Chitika AD under every article text.
• Put your license in visible place. Scarecrows can make autoblogger turn back and some of the scraper robots that want to survive are going to point a link to your site if they see you are licensed under creative commons or so.
• Always point to your sources (e.g. your own blog) when answering Yahoo! answers or writing HowTo’s.
• When you can, use plugins that place content only if the content is in your own site. (such as wp-table) The scrapper will only get [ table ID = 1/ ] instead of the original content. Have a look at this article -> http://www.gobalakrishnan.com/what-is-autoblogging-and-how-does-it-work/ It is autoblogged article about autoblogging 😀 Somehow the original author wanted your opinion in a decent poll with a poll plugin. The thief copied something with square brackets instead.

Autoblogging is not Blogging after all…

Do not feel bad about the people that do It.

• They are not real bloggers.
• They don’t have real loyal readers.
• Search engines are not dumb, they soon drop their page rank and stop rating them on the same page as your articles.
• Their AdSense and Chitika accounts get suspended if they get caught.
• Google and Yahoo! often change their rating and search algorithms so the Autoblog scraper sites get behind or get caught.

Having said enough while being grumpy and bitter, I can add few more encouraging words:

• My Yahoo! answers being scraped still point to my articles.
• Good article that took me a week to create was stolen by a scraper. His WP account got disabled and his articles deleted after I reported him to WordPress staff.

… so, there is still hope for real bloggers to remain alive 😉

(Disclaimer: the site AutoBlog.com has nothing to do with Autoblogging software and is genuine blog. Good work guys. Keep up!)