With the demands on your time as a business owner, you may be very tempted to auto-post content to your site. After all, you have heard of the benefits of having content on your site -- in fact, many would say that unless your site has thousands of pages, you won't even register on Google's radar... That is true to some extent. But auto-posting content to your site is like carrying a knife to a gunfight.
What is auto-posting? Very simply, there is software you can get for a site that will automatically troll the Internet for content in public domain areas based on keywords you choose, and then post that content to your blog or website. This could be in the form of videos, RSS feeds, articles, etc. You can literally put thousands of pages a week on your site, or just a few a day. You're probably thinking, "Thousands of pages of content on keywords that are relevant to my website? What's could be bad about that?" The short answer -- everyone else is posting that content, too. That's what Google calls duplicate content. Google does not appreciate duplicate content, which is Internet speak for showing up at a cocktail party and repeating verbatim what the host is saying. Pretty irritating... Duplicate content is an issue with degrees of offense. If you put two identical articles on your website, that has a "large footprint" to Google. It's obvious that you're posting duplicate content, and it's easy for them to see that.
Even if you just change one word in an article -- for example, changing "Los Angeles" to "Santa Clarita, CA" -- it's still duplicate content. If you think Google is just a group of stupid servers on a farm somewhere, those computers are driven by sophisticated algorithms that have seen a thing or two... Not to mention the thousands of engineers and content cops Google employs to keep the Internet an intelligent place to be. A lesser duplicate content offense is using content in multiple places on the Internet. It's not clear how much Google rewards or penalizes duplicate content here, nor is it clear who is clearly rewarded and punished. This is where the fuzzy logic side of Google kicks in (read: content cops); if you scrape content from a Page 1 site, and you're a Page 1000 site, the Page 1 site will get the boost and you will lose. If the Page 1 site steals from the Page 1000 site, that's less known, but it's surmised that the higher ranking site will have higher buoyancy factors that will make the damage minimal. When you're a Page 1000 site, you just don't need penalties of any kind... Please note I'm specifically not using "Page Rank" to talk about sites, because Page Rank is merely an expression to describe the relative importance of a site, and it's usually based on how many backlinks (and the types of backlinks) a site is getting, rather than other factors. Rather, I'm speaking in very practical terms of where your site ranks for any given keyword in your niche, not Page Rank or PR.
The other problem with scraping content and auto-posting it is the lack of control you may have. Even the best filters and plugins are still vulnerable to content spammers. Consider a case in point with a recent site I worked on. The site was filled with dozens of posts of unsavory content that the site owner did not even know they had scraped and loaded onto their site! Imagine their customers arriving for useful information and finding barely clothed women instead. NOT good for branding! The owner did everything right -- they installed the content scraper, chose appropriate keywords, etc. But there are forces on the Internet who play a game; if they know there's a large audience for a given keyword, they will usurp that keyword and include it with their spam content. The content gets scraped, loaded onto your site, and you are now spamming your own customer. Even if the content source deletes the spam content from its website, you still have it on yours!
These are a few of the pitfalls of autoposting content on your site. Saving time and finding shortcuts are good goals, just be sure you're not alienating your site's visitors in the process. You're responsible for what is on your website, no one else.
John Flynn is an online marketing consultant for real business, specializing in creating profitable websites for brick & mortar businesses and finding hidden niches of revenue for his clients. Mr. Flynn managed his first web property in the Internet's infancy in 1999, and combines his years of online expertise with over 12 years operating a chain of specialty retail stores and over 9 years in a successful service-based business prior to starting his business consulting firm [http://kineticswebpro.com]. Mention this article for $100 discount on consulting services for your web business.
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Autoposting-Content-on-Your-Website---Beware-the-Pitfalls&id=2861933
What is auto-posting? Very simply, there is software you can get for a site that will automatically troll the Internet for content in public domain areas based on keywords you choose, and then post that content to your blog or website. This could be in the form of videos, RSS feeds, articles, etc. You can literally put thousands of pages a week on your site, or just a few a day. You're probably thinking, "Thousands of pages of content on keywords that are relevant to my website? What's could be bad about that?" The short answer -- everyone else is posting that content, too. That's what Google calls duplicate content. Google does not appreciate duplicate content, which is Internet speak for showing up at a cocktail party and repeating verbatim what the host is saying. Pretty irritating... Duplicate content is an issue with degrees of offense. If you put two identical articles on your website, that has a "large footprint" to Google. It's obvious that you're posting duplicate content, and it's easy for them to see that.
Even if you just change one word in an article -- for example, changing "Los Angeles" to "Santa Clarita, CA" -- it's still duplicate content. If you think Google is just a group of stupid servers on a farm somewhere, those computers are driven by sophisticated algorithms that have seen a thing or two... Not to mention the thousands of engineers and content cops Google employs to keep the Internet an intelligent place to be. A lesser duplicate content offense is using content in multiple places on the Internet. It's not clear how much Google rewards or penalizes duplicate content here, nor is it clear who is clearly rewarded and punished. This is where the fuzzy logic side of Google kicks in (read: content cops); if you scrape content from a Page 1 site, and you're a Page 1000 site, the Page 1 site will get the boost and you will lose. If the Page 1 site steals from the Page 1000 site, that's less known, but it's surmised that the higher ranking site will have higher buoyancy factors that will make the damage minimal. When you're a Page 1000 site, you just don't need penalties of any kind... Please note I'm specifically not using "Page Rank" to talk about sites, because Page Rank is merely an expression to describe the relative importance of a site, and it's usually based on how many backlinks (and the types of backlinks) a site is getting, rather than other factors. Rather, I'm speaking in very practical terms of where your site ranks for any given keyword in your niche, not Page Rank or PR.
The other problem with scraping content and auto-posting it is the lack of control you may have. Even the best filters and plugins are still vulnerable to content spammers. Consider a case in point with a recent site I worked on. The site was filled with dozens of posts of unsavory content that the site owner did not even know they had scraped and loaded onto their site! Imagine their customers arriving for useful information and finding barely clothed women instead. NOT good for branding! The owner did everything right -- they installed the content scraper, chose appropriate keywords, etc. But there are forces on the Internet who play a game; if they know there's a large audience for a given keyword, they will usurp that keyword and include it with their spam content. The content gets scraped, loaded onto your site, and you are now spamming your own customer. Even if the content source deletes the spam content from its website, you still have it on yours!
These are a few of the pitfalls of autoposting content on your site. Saving time and finding shortcuts are good goals, just be sure you're not alienating your site's visitors in the process. You're responsible for what is on your website, no one else.
John Flynn is an online marketing consultant for real business, specializing in creating profitable websites for brick & mortar businesses and finding hidden niches of revenue for his clients. Mr. Flynn managed his first web property in the Internet's infancy in 1999, and combines his years of online expertise with over 12 years operating a chain of specialty retail stores and over 9 years in a successful service-based business prior to starting his business consulting firm [http://kineticswebpro.com]. Mention this article for $100 discount on consulting services for your web business.
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Autoposting-Content-on-Your-Website---Beware-the-Pitfalls&id=2861933
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