When you are a hardworking individual, paying for your own servers, tweaking your sites etc to make ends meet, it is really frustrating seeing people abuse your hard work.
Although you take basic measures to prevent hackers from misusing your site in a lot of ways, they always find new and faster ways to get on top. The easier your site is to use for real users, the easier it is for spammers to get in.
What drives these people? Do they tell their parents; ‘look ma, pa, I have a cool job, I f*ck people over and make a few cents with it for some unethical person on the other side of the world!’? Or do they keep it quiet and no-one, not even their spouses know about their profession?
I have been running my automated blog for 2 weeks now. And the results are great. I am running at more than 1000 uniques per day now, people are commenting, posts are being pinged.
The reason why this works seems because I am not using standard software to get to the content. I wrote all code myself to search and scrape content and put it nicely into the blog.
While there are many plugins that do exactly the same, these really didn’t have the same effect. With a same quality .com domain name and the same kind of content, the results of Google, Live and Yahoo indexing were far (far!) worse than with my new software.
As I set out to ‘generate’ content in the stealing sense of the word, I started working with tools that are available. These tools work with RSS feeds from the web to form web content. Unfortunately I found out that these tools mostly suck.
For my purpose I used Wordpress and some of it’s plug-ins, like WP-O-Matic to consume RSS feeds and show them on the WP page. This turned out not to be so straightforward.
Update (16 october): the automated test blog traffic is growing very fast: 2000 spider visits/250 uniques/1300 pageviews yesterday. Seems the experiment is working.
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