Splogs, Robo-blogs, and Article Directories - pick your poison

The question was raised recently about one of the remote blogs I was operating. The reader said it might be a robo-blog, but wondered, since the quality of the posts was very high.

And that is really what the difference between a splog, a robo-blog, and a remote blog is: quality of content.

Splogs are spam blogs and simply put the same content out over and over. 

Robo-blogs are low-quality posts which are not identical to other blogs, but are only modified enough to "fool" the search engines. (Which are noone's fools and actually penalize such blogs the same.)

True remote blogs contribute to the community they are found in and are nearly indistinguishable from other main or principle blogs they link to and support.

The trick is how to pull this off. You don't want to spend  your life creating original content for all these blogs. Or simply make too-numerous alterations so that each post appears "original".

There are several points to approach this with:

1. Use a high-quality article spinner to turn out alternate renditions of each major blog post from your main blog.
2. Create personal pages on each remote blogs and identities (aliases) which show real care.
3. Keep each remote blog specific to a single line of content and not a lot of disrelated posts for various affiliate products. 
4. Ensure each remote blog also links out to relevant content across the blogsphere and the web to assist others with their own rankings - paying it forward in advance, providing service just as your "main" blog does.
5. Get a post creation and tracking system which won't kill you off from tedious over-work.

And since the get-rich-quick guys won't do all the hard, detailed work above, they only creat splogs - or at best, robo-blogs.

The overall point is to create versions of posts, and treat each remote blog as you would an article directory. But unless you want to create an article directory from a blog (and this is possible with self-hosted Wordpress now) you want to keep to a single, defined category of interest so that your remote blog becomes another trusted authority to the search engines - and even competes with your main blog. (I've seen some of my remote blogs rank higher than my main blog at times - which is fine, since it also links to any affiliate product I'm supporting, and my own book sales.)

Essentially, then, you are just continuing the "conversation domination" techniques. The same as if you created Weebly sites, Squidoo lenses, or post your blog articles to Zimbio, post presentations of that same material to Slideshare, record podcasts and host on Archive.org, or make videos and post through Tube Mogul or PixelPipe.

But if you try to take the quick route - you wind up penalizing your main blog and wiping out its standings.

Your choice of poison.

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Oh - you might have seen that if you take our excellent content and have a quality article spinner to run it through, you can also post it to numerous article directories - or unique versions of it, any way. Write once, publish many times and ways... Check out your blog production flow and see if this might not make it more efficient.

Auto blogs don't work - but twitter does

I've been working with various "pipes" situations, rigging aggregators and whatnot in order to acquire and utilize data. 

A few notes on this:

Google Alerts piped to Blogger eventually get shut down. Usually the Google Alerts just disappears. Once I got a notice that Blogger thought one of my blogs was a "spam blog" and so I shut it down myself.   Apparently content that is only built through Google Alerts can be considered a "spam blog" but one which has human-edited content originally isn't.

Google Alerts piped through an imaginary friend on Friendfeed to Twitter is a success - as well as mixing it in with other news RSS feeds. I've got an imaginary "http://twitter.com/joethunk" which was developed simply to give me news feeds and an alert which is all the "how to's, learn to's, and ways to" which show up on the web. This has over 466 followers as of today. I imagine if I put a babe as an icon, it would get even more. Just the way life works. But its right now the content which is valuable to people.

Using Alerts to pipe to Friendfeed and then using that RSS back to a blog (probably a WordPress plugin) would be the next approach. A direct Google Alerts to Blogger using a mail-to approach leaves the header in, so is easily worked out. When those alerts go through Friendfeed, that header disappears. Posting it on a Wordpress blog would be a workable auto-blog. While Google could lower it's rankings, it couldn't stop it as it does with Blogger.

Now, if you could do that with a video feed, you'd be really popular, depending on how you themed it...

All for now, a couple more posts to do elsewhere. 

Oh - remote blogs do work, you just have to watch your subdomain names and not directly "take over" trademarks.  Research shows that adding "blows" or "sucks" after a tradename is legal.

Care and Feeding of Social Media: a remote blog-outpost primer

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leeco/

Sure, social media dominates Google - by their choice. Because social media already has been "vetted" by others and so is popular. And Google simply follows things that are popular and helps others find them.

Homework for our first lesson is to get a copy of "Bending the Web" from Jack Humphrey. While you're out there searching, find a copy of his "60 day plan" in PDF format so you get an even broader clue about what he's talking about.

Essentially, the point is to get your content on as many other sites as possible for any given keyword.

Now, this video (which I did a year ago - my how Internet time flies) shows you a simple route to do this:



But your mileage may vary. For this example, I didn't take some hot keyword with a lot of competition or even figured out how to push a particular product with it. The general idea is there, though - write your content once, publish it many ways as fast as you can. And make sure it all links with the same keyword to the site you are promoting.


Good Hunting!

Use of remote blogs to subvert someone's keyword ownership

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sookie/

The only thing missing in that headline is "dominate".
(But the photo's worth a thousand links...)

Unlikely theory and potential Black Hat SEO use - post removed...