Auto-Blog R.I.P.

For a long time confusion has reigned about the subject of duplicate content.  Some would have had us believe that publishing content from sources other than that by your own hand would lead to a slap by the mighty ‘G’.  This was never the case.

What Google did frown up however, was publishing the same content on the same site.  This is the reason that auto-blogs worked so well (If they were implemented correctly). On a number of occasions I have seen my own content scraped and posted on an auto-blog, ranking higher that my original article!

But… That is about to stop.  In fact, with today’s announcement by Matt Cutts, it looks like the era of auto-blogging has come to an end.

This is what he said..

“My [Matt Cutts] post mentioned that “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”

What does this mean?

Well, the jury is still out on what will happen to article directories, but it seems fair to say that the auto-blog will be all but wiped out.

So, if you are amongst the army of affiliate marketers that have invested in one of the many auto-blog systems around, then you will need to have a re-think on the way you earn a living.

Or, if you are currently considering buying one of the brand new products like this one, which are being heavily promoted by the “Gang of Guru’s”, then think very carefully before parting with any money!

Death of the Auto-blog?