Mike

Cycle sites are autoblogs on crack basically. An autoblog is any blog that does the updating itself to some degree. In other words, they pull feeds from other blogs or search engines and posts those to the autoblog (also known as a "splog" or "spam blog").

Where cycles sites differ (primarily) is the number of feeds they pull and ping per day. If you read through the huge thread in the SQUIRT forum, you'll notice that people are using feeds to post 1000 - 4000 posts per day. Also, with the cycle site they automatically try to send a trackback to the blog they took the content from. Sometimes they are successful, sometimes not. But the fact that you are hitting 1000's of blogs / posts per day, they will be successful enough to build a shit load of links in a short period of time. After which you shut it down and park the domain or put up a static page.

Because WP is not very efficient in terms of server resources, it's best not to do a cycle site on shared hosting. You'll get your account terminated very quickly, if you don't crash the server first.

Autoblogs, on the other hand, are generally much more tame - only pulling from a few feeds per day. Most autoblogs can run forever without too much of a problem. I've got one that has been plugging along for a long time with zero problems, but it only pulls from 5 feeds, and only when I bother to manually click "Update". It makes about $0.15 to $0.30 per day (woo hoo). Now figure it takes me less than 30 seconds per week or month to deal with. Hell, I actually forgot about it for a couple months and it still did it's thing. Figure out a way to hammer out 1000 of those and you got a decent daily income.

It's all about scale and what you are trying to accomplish.

/edit/ forgot to add: that small autoblog is ALL duplicate content, yet it is indexed in all the SE's and has links to it.

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