Comment on SEO Silo Theme by SEO Dave.

SEO Silo Structure Be very careful with autoblogging, if Google determines your domain is an autoblog it will be downgraded. It’s not IF Google catches you out for autoblogging, it’s WHEN. I’ve been testing autoblogging/thin content for over a decade and Google always catches the domain eventually.

WPRobot is the best WordPress autoblog plugin I’ve tested (tested a lot over the years) and have added autoblog SEO features to Stallion Responsive that will reduce the number of autoblog footprints Google can look for, BUT it’s only going to delay the inevitable.

My advice is NEVER autoblog on an important domain, you mentioned in your comment “My traffic will be ROCKIN in 5 years”, that’s the perfect attitude for building a successful website, so many webmasters want success NOW and it just doesn’t work that way any more.

10 years ago a domain like yours (adult niche, loads of traffic available in adult niches) could be generating millions of visitors in a couple of years from going live. Unless the business has an enormous budget or something that catches the eye of the community they are targeting (goes viral), it’s now like building a real bricks and mortar business, it’s years of hard work if relying mostly on organic search engine traffic.

Google has got so much better at finding low quality sites (Google considers autoblogs and thin content low quality) and growth in competition from other webmasters is exponential. Fortunately with the growth in competition has been an equal growth in search engine visitors, so it’s still possible to carve out a niche with a lot of traffic. Many SERPs that weren’t worth targeting 10 years ago are now decent traffic.

If you put an autoblog plugin on your important money domain and you generate thousands of new webpages and Google indexes them and ranks them as unique content, your traffic will grow significantly. However, when Google slaps your domain as a low quality autoblog (could be in months or years) the traffic will die off and even your high quality unique content will suffer. 5 years from now your traffic won’t be rockin, will more likely be dead.

Google only has to catch your domain once for autoblogging for a penalty, to recover you’d have to remove all the duplicate content and work your butt off to be trusted again. With a domain that’s had a penalty Google no longer trusts the domain: think cheating husband who gets caught, the trust is gone and the wife will always doubt what the husband is up to, is he working late tonight or cheating again. Once caught you need to be whiter than white SEO wise, don’t get caught (good luck with that) or don’t ever cheat.

Doesn’t mean you can’t make money from autoblogging, but assume any domain you add an autoblog to will be worthless 3 years from now**. Question is whether in the time between creating the autoblog and Google penalizing it, can you make enough money to make it worthwhile?

** Probably won’t be worthless, I have penalized domains filled with autoblogged and/or thin affiliate content that makes enough money to make them worthwhile to keep them, but not enough money to spend days of my time working on them. If all I have to do is update WordPress and a few other minor maintenance issues once a year (few hours work a year) to make $500+ a year, they are worth keeping (not worth working on/promoting though).

Over the past 5 years I’ve only built autoblogs for SEO testing (not trying to make money from autoblogs per se), bit obsessed with trying to beat Google, but Google always wins long term on autoblogs and thin content :-)

David